The Complete Guide to Original Apple SSDs. Installing macOS on an SSD Is it possible to expand the integrated SSD in a MacBook

The MacBook Air was not meant to be expanded or upgraded, but it turns out that with a little effort, you can replace an SSD yourself. This will greatly increase the storage size of the laptop and often its performance. Another common reason to install a new SSD is when it breaks. In any case, replacing an SSD on a MacBook Air is easy to do and the procedure remains the same.

Preparation

Installing a new SSD will require a few things:

• New replacement SSD that is compatible with your current laptop model
• special screwdrivers (Torx 5T and Pentalobe);
• 2-3 small containers for temporary storage of screws.

The process of replacing an SSD on a MacBook Air is fairly straightforward, although it does involve disassembling and reassembling the Mac. Please note that this method only applies to laptops that are out of warranty. Replacing hardware can void your warranty, so if it's still valid, you'll need to contact Apple Support or the Apple Store for a professional fix.

Step 1: Compatibility Check

First of all, you should make sure that the SSD is compatible with your specific MacBook Air model. This usually depends on the year of manufacture of the device, so it is important to know it. You can get this information from the About This Mac menu item. Something like "MacBook Air (13" Early 2012)" or similar message will appear on the screen.

After determining the exact model name and year of manufacture, a compatible SSD can be found on online shopping sites such as Amazon.

Step 2: Choosing an SSD

The choice of brands and types of SSDs is large and the user can follow their preferences. An example is Transcend's 240 GB Upgrade Kit. Users like it for several reasons: good price, fast performance, great reviews, good warranty, and a complete upgrade kit that includes a case for an old SSD and the screwdrivers needed to complete the job. Other brands also offer similar package solutions.

Of course, you can absolutely freely buy another compatible SSD that is not part of the kit. You just need to get the appropriate screwdrivers and ensure that the drive and Mac are compatible.

Other drives can be connected using an SSD adapter. The MacBook Air, however, must be released no later than 2012, since since then Apple has introduced encryption of data flows between the SSD and the motherboard.

Step 3: backup

Before replacing an SSD on a Macbook Air, you need to back up the drive. Experts recommend at least setting up a Time Machine backup, and some more sophisticated users combine this measure with SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner direct disk cloning tools. The only exception is the case when the disk has completely failed or is missing - obviously there is nothing to copy here.

After connecting an external drive, you need to go to the system settings menu, select the Time Machine option and specify the backup location.

This step should not be skipped. If the backup is not created, there will be nothing to restore, and the new disk will not contain the necessary data. This is not the case that I would like to experience for myself. Using Time Machine also has the advantage that you can clean install the operating system on a new SSD and then restore your Mac from a backup.

Step 4: Replacing the Drive

Now comes the fun part - opening the case and replacing the MacBook Air SSD with a new one. To do this, you will need boxes for screws, since you will have to deal with fasteners of different sizes and types. Fasteners are best sorted by size and installation location.

This part of the process requires some skill. Users with experience in the field of electronics will most likely feel at ease, but the rest will want to read the manual, which describes in detail the procedure. Instead of reinventing the wheel, experts recommend checking out the detailed instructions on the iFixIt website as they are well explained, detailed and comprehensive.

The main thing to do is to disconnect the laptop from the power supply, unscrew the bottom panel and remove it, disconnect the internal battery, and then change the SSD. According to iFixIt, the difficulty of replacing a 13” MacBook Air SSD is rated as average, but according to experts, anyone with patience and the ability to follow the instructions can easily do the job, even if they are a beginner.

SSD Replacement Instructions

To replace a solid state drive, you need:

1. Remove the screws on the bottom of the MacBook Air 13 and put them in separate boxes according to their size, type and installation location.
2. Remove bottom panel. Discharge static electricity before touching internal components.
3. Disable internal battery. To do this, take the plastic holder attached to the battery connectors and pull it towards the front edge of the laptop. Do not forget about this, as well as the fact that it will need to be connected again after the installation is completed.
4. Remove the SSD by first unscrewing the screw holding it. The device is in the center, directly above the battery.
5. Install a new SSD, secure it with a screw, and then connect the internal battery.
6. Put on the bottom cover and secure it.

Once everything is back in place, you can start installing the software.

Step 5: X and data recovery

The procedure described here is slightly different from the sequence of steps indicated in some other technical manuals. In this case, an empty solid state drive is installed, which then requires OS installation and data recovery. Others advise that before replacing the SSD in the MacBook Air, copy the contents of the disk. Proactive cloning is often the best approach, but in the event of a drive failure, this is not possible, as it becomes completely inoperable, as evidenced by the question mark when booting and testing Apple hardware.

Fortunately, having a Time Machine backup lets you install and restore in a different way. If the cloning method is preferred, Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are applications that will do the job just fine.

Data Recovery Procedure

The first option involves two steps: performing a clean installation of the operating system using a bootable flash drive, and then restoring a backup from Time Machine during installation. It works great. Keep in mind that restoring a MacBook Air SSD backup can be started right after a clean install of Mac OS X.

To do this, connect the disk with the data backup and turn on the laptop while holding down the Command + R buttons. On the Utilities screen, select "Restore Backup" and click "Continue". Having specified the disk with the copy, you need to select its date and time. When the copy process is complete, the laptop will reboot.

You can also try using Time Machine directly. But this means you have to manually re-create the recovery partition, and you may run into EFI partition errors. These issues can be avoided by performing a clean install of Mac OS X first.

After the operating system and data are restored, the laptop is ready for normal work with the new SSD.

Hi all! Today I will tell you how I changed the hard drive to an SSD drive in my new MacBook. I already talked about on my blog, and that I bought a MacBook Pro 13 without Retina. So in this laptop there is a terribly slow HDD Hard drive, its rotation speed is 5400 because of this, there are noticeable freezes when starting certain applications or when waking up from sleep. I especially notice this due to the fact that I have been using an SSD hard drive in a stationary computer for 3 years already, I have the system and the necessary programs installed on it, plus I also bought one SSD drive for games, sometimes I like to play various cool games.

I'm not saying that Apple missed the mark with this laptop and made it slow, no. Just like anyone else, someone would not even notice this if there was nothing to compare with.

This laptop has a drive, I found a lot of videos and articles on the Internet about the upgrade option by replacing the drive with optibay (dvd slim 9.5mm adapter for HDD) in which you can put a hard drive instead of a drive and put an SSD in the place where the HDD was. I bought everything, and an adapter and an SSD drive for 256 GB Vertex 450 from the manufacturer OCZ (The price is crazy 7890r.) Why did I choose OCZ? “For me, this is a proven durability maker, as SSDs have a limited number of write cycles.

Optibay - The thing is very interesting, many thanks to the one who came up with it, I think such a thing will come in handy for those who have a laptop that is not quite new, it will be possible to put an SSD drive instead of a drive and Windows will work many times faster even on not very powerful hardware.

I thought for a long time and decided that, in principle, I don’t need a second HDD instead of a drive and decided to leave the drive and just put a 256 gigabyte SSD, this is not so little for a working laptop, especially since I have an external USB hard and stationary PC .

Let's start replacing this very slow HDD!

The first thing we need is a tool, we need a small Phillips Torx screwdriver, I still have it from the moment when I changed the glass on my old iPhone 4. Hexagon and a plastic spatula, also from the kit. The tool in the analysis of Apple technology plays a very important role! No need to twist those little bolts with a knife! I recommend not to rush, and if you don’t have the necessary tools, then it’s better not to take it, but first buy everything you need.

Now you need to remove static electricity from yourself, I searched on the Internet how to do this and decided that it would be easier to just undress to my underpants than to look for all sorts of antistatic agents

Turn off the laptop and turn it over

Before unscrewing, draw a diagram on a piece of paper in order not to get confused in the bolts, because in all Apple technology, almost all the bolts are different. Here we have 3 long and 7 short in these seven by 4 there is a border, this is important.

So we draw just such a thing and put the bolts in their places, so that later they can be screwed back into place without any problems! This method works in disassembling any device, and it is very effective - why did I not know about it when I disassembled my toys as a child

Unscrewed, laid out the bolts, remove the cover and disconnect the power cable! Otherwise, if you accidentally drop a screwdriver or some other metal object on the motherboard, a short circuit will occur and that's it, kapets, replacing the motherboard ... or maybe something else.

We do everything confidently and accurately with a plastic spatula!

Next, unscrew the hard drive holder. Again, I’m surprised how simple and high-quality everything is done, the holder is metal, the orange rubber bands in the photo clamp the mounting bolts so that the hard drive feels comfortable, I think it even cushions a little on impact and does less harm to the hard drive.

After removing the holder, carefully lift the hard drive and pull out the SATA cables, if it is difficult to disconnect, pry it off with a plastic spatula.

We twisted it, now we put our SSD in place, carefully connect the cable, and first insert the lower bolts into the orange rubber bands and clamp it with the holder.

We close the lid back, take the bolts from our diagram, and screw everything into place.

Don't worry about the operating system, Apple excelled here too! Let's install everything now. Yes, all data from the old hard drive will have to be transferred by connecting to a computer or via a SATA - USB adapter, I think this will not be difficult.

We connect the laptop to the Internet via a cable (it's faster) or via Wi Fi, it will prompt you to choose an access point, which one to connect to, enter the password and that's it.

Turn on the laptop and hold down the CMD + R keys until the progress bar appears, after the bar is full we will see this image:

Unfortunately, they offer to install OS X Mountain Lion, although OS X Mavericks has been out for a long time, but it’s okay to update later, we don’t have a hackintosh (I used Hackintosh on my stationary PC for about a year, then my craving for Apple began, especially caught the attention of Time Machine, this thing will never be in Windows!)

Do not rush to click continue, first go to the top menu in Utilities, Disk Utility and create or partition a hard drive. After that, click "Continue", accept the license agreement, and select the disk on which we will install.

I have one, I did not share it:

We are waiting for the process of downloading the installation files of the system, it is not necessary to sit and wait, it will do everything automatically, after downloading the files, it will reboot and the installation will begin, which will take place quite quickly.

Here is the result of the speed of work, using the example of running Adobe Photoshop CS 6:

I once installed Windows 8 on an SSD using a USB 3.0 installation stick on a PC with an intel i5 processor, to be honest I was shocked because the installation time from start to desktop took only 8 minutes! That's cool, what's in the future?

That's all, I think the information will be useful. Thank you for your attention! Subscribe to my blog updates. Ask questions in the comments, in the future I think I will write how I installed more RAM, but for now I am satisfied with 4 gigabytes on a laptop.

(early 2011) at home.

There is a crisis in the yard, and dreams of buying a new Macbook are dissipating like smoke. In this harsh time, when a kilogram of ordinary cucumbers costs like a kilogram of Israeli apples, it's time to get a screwdriver and upgrade your faithful aluminum comrade with your own hands.

If there is no screwdriver, hands, or lack of courage, if you please, turn to the professionals of modding and repair. Proven masters live in the company modmac who, with unwavering hands, will ruthlessly dismantle any gadget, fix it and assemble it back without unnecessary remaining parts.

On a winter Saturday morning, by the pattern of clouds in the sky, I realized - it's time! Having made a backup, my MacBook Pro and I went to workshop for rejuvenation surgery. The plans included replacing the native HDD cable with a new one, as well as replacing the optical drive with a super-fast SSD drive using a special Optibay tray.

Few people know, but if you put an SSD drive instead of a native HDD, and install a native HDD as a second hard drive instead of a CD drive, then in this situation the system will work a little slower. It is better to stick an SSD drive in place of the optical drive, and leave the native HDD in its place. Performance will be higher.

Upon arrival at the place, my laptop immediately passed into the hands of the master, and I got the small role of an impassive extra, who recorded on camera every movement of the specialist’s hands.

Preparation

So, the MacBook Pro is located on the table, turned upside down, revealing its defenseless belly to our eyes. With deft movements of a Phillips screwdriver, 10 screws were unscrewed along the perimeter of the back cover. And then, with little effort, the lid was removed and carefully set aside.

Once again, I marveled at the ergonomic arrangement of all components inside the brainchild of Steve Jobs. How fascinating all the stuffing is fitted to each other!

The first stage is successfully completed, we move on to the next level.

HDD cable replacement

In my MacBook, the hard drive is removed quite simply. In some models, for example, to pull out the HDD, you must first remove the battery, but this is not our case. So here's what you need to do, point by point:

1) Disconnect the cable leading from the battery to the board;

2) unscrew the two screws and pull out the clamping bar;

3) gently pull the hard drive by the special tab and use your fingers (with a mediator, a special plastic spatula) to disconnect the cable from the hard drive.

The hard drive cable is very fragile, it is not recommended to pull, tear and twist it strongly.

Why you need to change the cable to a new one: sometimes (rarely, but still) after replacing an ordinary HDD with an SSD, the MacBook drive starts to behave strangely. It seems that disk utility sees the new SSD, formats it and does not find any errors; The operating system is downloaded, but all installation attempts are interrupted by a gray screen with a flashing folder icon or a question mark.

In this case, replacing the hard drive cable helps. The operation is very jewelry and requires confident movements and some skill in such actions. Here is how the HDD cable is replaced:

1) Carefully disconnect the cable connector from the board, unscrew the two screws that fix the cable in the case and the two screws that fix the black bar on the front inner wall of the case.

With your fingers, carefully pull out the black bar to which the HDD cable is glued and be horrified by the miniature size of the connector, which must be carefully removed.

At this stage, you need to gather all your concentration into a fist and disconnect the connector from the HDD cable with tweezers. You can’t swear at your mother, it’s desirable to breathe every other time.

After this dangerous procedure, you can exhale and relax, the HDD cable is completely removed.

So, at this stage, we have removed the native hard drive and completely disconnected its cable. To install a new cable, all the above steps must be repeated in reverse order. Again, the hardest part is connecting the small connector to the connector on the new HDD cable.

Replacing an optical drive with an SSD drive

Carefully disconnect the cable responsible for Airport/Bluetooth and the camera cable from the board. These cables (like most others) are very fragile and brittle.

Then carefully remove the cable around the perimeter of the CD drive and disconnect the antenna connector.

The easiest thing left is to unscrew the three screws holding the optical drive, carefully remove it, and disconnect the cable connector. Everything, half the work is done, now you need to insert an SSD drive into the resulting void.

SSD and Optibay

Everything is simple here. An Optibay tray is taken, a new SSD drive is inserted into it, two fixing screws need to be tightened on the side, a short cable from the CD drive, which was removed in the previous step, is inserted into the tray, and the entire resulting structure is inserted into place. In conclusion, repeat all the above manipulations to remove the drive in reverse order.

At the very end, the main thing is not to forget to reconnect the battery cable, which was disconnected at the very beginning of this instruction article.

Note to the owner

After “pumping” the MacBook wizard from modmac can set up something like Fusion Drive.

Fusion Drive is a technology that combines a conventional hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) with 128 GB of flash memory into a single logical volume. Mac OS X automatically manages its contents, so frequently used files such as applications, documents, photos (and so on) are dynamically moved to flash memory for faster access. For example, if a program is used frequently, it will automatically be moved to an SSD drive to speed up access to it. As a result, startup times are reduced, and as the system accumulates information about the computer usage profile, programs start up and access files faster.
– Wikipedia

Through cunning manipulations with terminal commands, the guys from modmac can configure the MacBook so that the system will see one shared drive, with a capacity of 768 gigabytes (total capacity of SSD and HDD drives) as if it were a single SSD drive.

Productivity grows, nerves are protected, the owner is happy. I highly recommend. The only caveat is that during the operation of the laptop, you need to avoid emergency shutdowns, the Fusion Drive may “crumble”, and you will have to restore all the information again ( so you should always remember about backup!).

We note right away that the information will not be useful for owners of the most modern laptops, because, firstly, they only come with pre-installed solid state drives, and secondly, the installed drives have an unconventional form factor and interface.
But for owners made in the 2.5 ”form factor and with a SATA interface, the presented instructions will help increase the performance of the laptop without significant costs.

You can, of course, contact the official Apple service center for a replacement drive, but the service can be quite expensive, and besides, you will probably be offered some kind of Solit-State Drive Kit - “official, from the manufacturer”, the price of which, to put it mildly, is will not match performance.

We, in turn, suggest that you replace the HDD with an excellent SSD yourself and are ready to provide.

In the photos below you can see the SanDisk SSD. It was this solid state drive that ended up in our laboratory at the time of this article. This SSD instance is based on the SandForse SF-2281 controller, which has proven itself well in other solid state drives. characterized by high read / write speed and increased fault tolerance.

So what do we need?

This whole procedure will not take you even 30 minutes, but the performance of the laptop will increase quite seriously - the operating system and applications will load almost instantly and in general the laptop will “respond” to your requests much faster. This is because the system will have instant access to data, which is exactly what is needed to increase the speed of work.
In addition, it does not make any sounds even when actively working with data, so your MacBook will become even quieter.
In addition, due to the significantly lower power consumption of an SSD, compared to any 2.5" HDD, the MacBook will be able to work a little longer on a single battery charge - this is another undeniable plus from using SSDs in laptops.
The only thing that will lose yours is a couple of grams of weight, because the SSD is also a little lighter than the hard drive.

One of the most worrying problems for computer and laptop users is a hard drive failure. All data on it may be lost if the necessary measures are not taken in time.

When Should You Replace Your Macbook Hard Drive?

It is not difficult to independently determine the malfunction of your Macbook's HDD or SSD if you know the main symptoms of problems. If you notice any of the following, try to copy your important data to another media or cloud storage as soon as possible and contact Macsouls - we will quickly replace the SSD or HDD on your Macbook Pro and supply a new SSD for your MacBook Air.

1. Most often, the laptop freezes when working with files located on the disk. If your Macbook freezes when you try to write a new file or save changes to an old one, then most likely the hard drive has become unusable and needs to be replaced.
2. Critical hard drive problems will cause your laptop to display a folder icon with a question mark when you turn it on and refuse to boot the system.
3. If an HDD is installed on your Macbook, then it may start making uncharacteristic sounds - squeaking, grinding, clicking. All these symptoms are the reason for contacting the service center.

Replacing HDD with SSD at Macsouls Service Center

Today, HDD and SSD hard drives are the most common. Older Macbooks have HDDs, but they can be replaced with safer, more reliable and modern Solid State Hard Drives (SSDs). They are not afraid of shaking and do not suffer from mechanical wear, as they do not have mechanical parts.

At Macsouls Service Center, you can replace your old HDD with an SSD for Mac. The new MacBook Pro SSD will impress you with quieter operation and less tendency to overheat than its older counterpart.

How do you replace a MacBook Pro ssd in Macsouls?

If you contacted us because of problems related to the operation of the laptop, but first of all, the wizard will conduct a free diagnostic to determine the cause of the malfunction. The engineer will then use special plastic tools to remove the case of your Macbook, disconnect the old drive, and plug in the new one. This operation usually takes no more than half an hour.

Benefits of Macsouls

1. Our service center always has hard drives from different manufacturers in stock.
2. We replace HDD/SSD hard drives with MacBook Air/Pro/Pro Retina of all modifications.
3. We guarantee the correct operation of the hard drive, because we work only with original spare parts.
4. All of our employees are qualified and experienced Apple repair technicians.

The new hard drive will run silently and will not heat up.