Brandi's four-plus-year-old computer bummed her out. It crashed all the time. It ran out of memory: 512 MB RAM might look great in 2004, but in 2008 it feels a little like a corset: quaint and painfully tight. Every time she used Photoshop she would get an error indicating the hard drive was full. The page file (the bit of the hard drive Photoshop uses to store all of your previous versions, so you can go backwards through 20 or more changes) took up all the remaining space. Brandi would get upset; I would get upset that I didn't have time to deal with the crisis, hard words would be exchanged and, inevitably, the feelings of a 6 lb lump of plastic would get hurt.
Well, the week before last, I took matters in my own hands with her iBook, stripping down the machine into its motherboard, plastic casing, aluminum inner casing, and about 50 screws, all of which I carefully labeled and most of which I returned to their proper positions. (There are always parts left over.) Eventually, I replaced the 40 GB hard drive with a much newer 160 GB hard drive that I DARE my wife to fill up before the computer dies. And the one mystery screw? No worries. If the remaining 49 don't hold the machine together, natural laws are meaningless and we all have moments to live anyhow. Luckily for us all, so far they have.
Well, this little daylong project (about 3 hours of screws plus another 2 of hard drive copying), gave me confidence for my Macbook. In the intervening two years between the sale of Brandi's computer and the advent of mine, Apple took it upon itself to reinvent the way users accessed the guts of its machines. So all it took to get to the hard drive of mine was the removal of the battery and a small cover inside the battery slot, about fifteen fewer steps. I had done it before, for fun. (I'm insane.) All I needed to do it yesterday was the proper hard drive.
This was my first great big, "Aha!" in a while. Last Christmas, I got a tiny portable external hard drive from Brandi's father. It looked a lot like a 2.5" hard drive in a plastic enclosure, but how best to tell? Brandi's computer taught me that sometimes equipment manufacturers just use plastic clips to tie everything together, and that the proper torque might pop them open without breaking them. It was a risk, though, so I practiced at work with another version of the drive I'd asked for from my supervisors. (I love these drives. I'm also insane.) I got it open with a minimum of breakage, and, what was more, the guts of the drive were a 2.5" SATA hard drive, exactly the same kind of drive as inside of my laptop.
So it was with great excitement that I fired up "SuperDuper," a cool program for cloning an Apple machine to another drive, set it running, and, three hours later, performed my second Apple brain transplant. It worked! I'm typing on the new/old computer at this very moment!
Only a few questions remain at this point:
- Does the new drive use more power or less? Will I take a hit on battery life because of it?
- I used to edit video off the external drive, and I assume connecting it more directly to the motherboard will increase throughput, but will access time beat the old drive?
- What to do with all that space? I used to liken hard drive space to that of a warehouse, but with warehouses, you can calculate space at a glance. Empty hard drives are like digital clocks versus analog clocks: harder to quantify. Very likely some of that space will be virtualization software. I've been dying to load Ubuntu on the Macbook for a while, and my job sometimes takes me into Vista territory, so now might be my chance.
- Do I get any geek cred for this? Probably not for hard drive replacement, but for guessing that Western Digital packed a standard SATA inside a plastic enclosure, then ripping everything open? Come on, don't I deserve at least a little?
Now I've used them again, in the last 24 hours, not once but TWICE. Thank you, Torx.
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