My model came two years ago with a 160 Gb drive. It was just plain out of space, especially after taking all the photos in Europe recently. Although I find the Mac must better in terms of applications using disk space, the documents, music and photos all add up.

I decided to go with a 7200 rpm drive, instead of the traditional 5400 rpm. That meant I would only get a 320 Gb drive, instead of 500 Gb. I bought the Western Digital drive online at newegg.com for $99, plus tax. Shipping was free. I arrived late in the day.

I put the new drive in my external hard drive dock. This is a cool device that holds either a 3.5 or 2.5 bare SATA hard drive. I ran SuperDuper to clone the existing drive to the new drive so once installed it would boot right up. Since this external doc is only USB 2, it took awhile, 5 hours in fact. It was now 11 pm and I was wonder if I should start this project. Of course I could not resist.

I put a piece of paper on the desk and wrote down where all the screws were coming from and place the screws there as I removed them. When I finally was removing the keyboard, the ribbon cable came disconnected before I could look underneath to see where it was attached, which gave me a bit of a startle. But I finally figured it out.

After the old drive was removed and the new on installed, and all the screws put back, I turned the computer on. It seemed to not start and I was now worried. But I guess it was just trying to figure out what to boot from since it had a new hard drive and shortly it started up.

I am very happy with the performance. It seems to be a much faster computing experience. The increase in performace could be from the faster hear drive, the larger hard drive with high density or the fact that I have much more free disk space. In any case I am glad I went with a faster hard drive. Only by testing a 5400 rpm 500 Gb drive compared with what I installed would one really know the best solution.