A Drive to Succeed

Last week the 480gb SSD (that's a 480 gigabyte solid state drive, for those of you not acronymically aware) in my Macbook Pro gave up the ghost. I tried getting Apple to remedy the problem, but I forgot until the Apple Store Genius opened it up that the computer has an Other World Computing SSD, not an Apple SSD--and once Apple's techs saw a non-Apple drive, they washed their hands of the problem.

Thankfully, the folks at OWC stand behind their product, and they rushed me a replacement SSD once we verified that the old drive was dead beyond repair. They also post a series of very helpful instructional clips demonstrating how to change a drive--and that was something I definitely needed, since I have a real aversion to doing any work on my own computer.

With the video in front of me, it turned out to be an easy procedure (once I secured the proper equipment--one very small Phillips head screwdriver, one very small torx screwdriver). I remembered earlier experiences with ribbon cables, multiple pins, mounting brackets, and so on. This was nothing like that; everything was easily accessible, the screws were right where they were supposed to be, everything was removed with no glitches, and the new drive went right in.

Just to be safe, though, I'm getting a replacement 750gb Apple hard drive; that's the drive that was originally installed in the computer. That way, if a problem does occur, I can just pop that drive into the machine and take it to the Apple store. I'll also clone my current system to that drive using Time Machine and an OWC Voyager unit (it lets you treat any SATA drive as if it were an external drive). That way, I not only have a working backup, but I have the OEM drive that Apple expects to see when they open up the computer!

Meanwhile, I'm pretty pleased with myself for opening up a computer, replacing a drive, and reinstalling the system without destroying the machine in the process. If you knew how very unskilled I am with electronics repair, you'd understand that this was quite an accomplishment for me!