After 18 months of having my MacBook Pro, I started outgrowing the hard drive. My laptop has to be a desktop replacement for me, since I am away from home so much. So, it has 1000’s of photos in RAW format, hours of camcorder footage, all my development environments, all my iTunes music, scans of every bit of post I receive and so on. I knew I was at the limit when I was having to offload stuff onto an external HDD in order to be able to keeping doing things I wanted to do.

External HDD’s are great, but fiddly as hell when your laptop is a mobile system. So, it was time for an upgrade, and I bought a Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 7200rpm drive.

Unlike the humble MacBook (where you can access the HDD from the battery bay), the MBP requires quite a strip down to get at the drive, and I needed a couple of extra tools for the job (a “spudger” and a Torx screw driver).