Gadgetory

what's up guys it's Lou from unbox therapy and today I'll be showing you how to upgrade your macbook pro it's a little bit different than usual you know normally it's unboxing videos but I thought this was going to be really useful for you guys you can heavily improve the performance of your macbook pro whether it's a 13 inch or 15 inch just remember this will not work on the retina models so this is one of the reasons I'm still a big fan of the non retina models because you can go in there and put whatever SSD you want put as much RAM as you want and then swap them out switch them at a later date you're not tied in to only having one configuration SSD technology has come a long way and it changes very rapidly so having that ability is a big deal we're also going to be putting 16 gigabytes of Corsair memory in here in terms of SSD we'll be using the Samsung 830 series a really high performer this is the 128 gigabyte model if you guys want to put a bigger SSD or you want to use this exact one all you got to do is check out the links down in the description everything that I use in this video in terms of this upgrade will be linked down there so you can not only check out pricing and availability but you can actually replicate this upgrade if you want to do the same thing I've done here in terms of the actual process it's pretty easy at least to me I don't know I've done this a couple of times and it can be intimidating at first you can get this little bottom plate removed and then when you get inside the MacBook Pro you're kind of like oh where do I go next but ultimately it's just about confidence and it's about being gentle and not forcing anything and just you know making intelligent assumptions I guess that's how I want to put it but if you guys need more detailed information than what's being provided in the video which is kind of vague I'll put a link in the description to full high-res photos and a teardown so you can follow that along with the video hopefully that can help you get this process done yourself it's easier than you think so the first thing to do is to remove the battery power from the logic board that's the first thing I did you just unclip it pretty easy to do that just make sure that you're not having any power getting pushed through to the logic board while you're working on it in this particular upgrade we'll be keeping the traditional hard drive and using an adapter like this this fits into the optical drive bay and allows you to install a two and a half inch drive whether it's an SSD or even a another traditional hard drive so that you can keep a bunch of storage while really upgrading your performance with an SSD like this Samsung 830 this is a 128 gigabyte drive as you guys know in the SSD world things are a little more expensive so getting your operating system and applications onto an SSD can really improve the performance of your system it's an amazing upgrade comparative to the price and then you can still keep your traditional hard drive for media and larger files that performance doesn't really benefit in a big way if you guys know what I'm saying so what you want to do here is remove all the ribbing cables connecting the optical drive and the traditional hard drive to the motherboard or logic board in the Apple world then you're going to need to remove the traditional hard drive even though it's only going to go back into the location where it came from as I said earlier guys you are going to want to look at the high-res photos provided through the link in the description if you actually do this I'm hoping that you can use this video along with those sort of as a companion to make you feel more comfortable about doing this upgrade yourself so if you're like me and you rarely use the optical drive on your system removing it and using one of these adapters is a fantastic way of improving the functionality of your system in many ways like if you want to go with two SSDs you could get a performance raid you could use it for redundancy by having a backup drive that's actually right in the system there's just a number of ways to really improve the functionality of your system by doing something like this I'm a really a big fan of this and it's the main reason that I still like the older design of MacBook Pros yes it's a little bit thicker it's not quite so thin but having this ability to pick the latest and greatest in terms of SSDs and install them whenever you like with just you know half an hour of time and removing a couple of screws to me that is invaluable especially for a pro user who is constantly looking to upgrade performance and also looking for redundancy and backup on the adapter you will need to install two screws to secure the SSD on the bottom other than that it's pretty simple you want reinstall it the same way as you took out the original optical drive and then you'll tighten down the traditional hard drive back into the location it came from so as you can see here we're completely finished we have two quick drives installed well one thicker than the other but both running on SATA 3 and what this means is that we're going to get great performance and still have a bunch of storage so we can use that for backup media files everything that I said before you're going to want to reinstall all the components so that they're tied down tightened down back where they came from and you're also going to want to make sure to plug in all the ribbon cables that originally came off the board when you were removing the optical drive the next thing to do is install the RAM upgrade as I mentioned earlier we're using some Corsair values select great value as the name implies in the RAM world this is 16 gigabytes of ddr3 and as I mentioned earlier if you want to replicate this upgrade you can use the exact same Ram and I'll link it down in the description so you can be sure that it works in my case I've booted the system after this video of course and made sure that it's performing as it should so definitely check out the link in the description if you want to pick up some value select 16 gigabytes or otherwise now after everything is installed and you boot up your system remember you can still boot to your traditional hard drive because it's still got your files in your OS on it then you'll notice that there's a new Drive in Disk Utility the SSD that you just installed now you do need to set it up to install your OS to it you have to give it a name as well as format it this is for obvious reasons in this case will be formatting it Mac OS extended journaled and at this point I do want to mention that the easiest way I found at this point here once you get to the end of replicating your installation is to clone it over to the SSD so I used a program called super dooper and all you do is you do a straight clone from your traditional hard drive to the SSD assuming it will fit and then what you want to do is delete or wipe out your traditional hard drive and then you can organize files after the fact so you can move media files etc over to the traditional drive while maintaining the important files that you want the OS the applications you know files that can benefit from the performance improvements you're going to want to put those on the SSD or keep them on the SSD so anyway guys I know I didn't go into a terrible amount of detail here but the purpose of this was just to make you more comfortable with upgrading your MacBook Pro this will work for either the 13 inch or 15 inch I've linked in the description the SSD as well as the RAM that I used and the drive bay adapter so you can get rid of that old-school optical drive and actually start using that space for something mission-critical like an SSD more storage a raid a backup drive there's really so many things you can do so this is a major reason to pick up one of the non-retina model MacBook Pros anyway guys I hope you enjoyed this video if you found it helpful useful entertaining in any way please remember to leave a like and favorite down below as it does help out a bunch if you haven't subscribed yet well hey you might want to do it right now if you especially if you enjoyed the video otherwise I catch guys on the next video thanks for watching later