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Repair guides for the MacBook.

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Question Closed

How do I replace hard drive?

Remove old hard drive and put in new one.

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Chosen Solution

It depends on which of the twelve generations of MacBook you have. The twelve generations cover nine years, and have four major incompatible technical architectures:

  1. A1181 - white/black plastic case, Intel Core Duo/Core2 Duo CPUs, DDR2 RAM, Intel/NVidia graphics, SuperDrive optical drive (2006-2009)
  2. A1278 - aluminum Unibody case, Intel Core2 Duo CPU, DDR3 RAM, NVidia graphics, SuperDrive optical drive (2008-2009)
  3. A1342 - white plastic Unibody case, Intel Core2 Duo CPUs, DDR3 RAM, NVidia graphics, SuperDrive optical drive (2009-2011)
  4. A1534 - aluminum Unibody case, Retina display, Intel Core M CPU, Intel HD graphics (April 2015->)

As you can see, each architecture has its own technique for installing/removing drives.

MacBook Core Duo Hard Drive Replacement

MacBook Core 2 Duo Hard Drive Replacement

MacBook Unibody Model A1278 Hard Drive Replacement

MacBook Unibody Model A1342 Hard Drive Replacement

The new Retina MacBook (released March 2015) does not currently have a drive replacement guide, but the teardown demonstrates that it doesn't use a traditional SATA hard drive. Instead, it uses a PCIe flash module inserted into an M.2 socket on the logic board. It may be a while before replacement drives in this format are available.

So, we first have to identify your computer before anything else can happen. The model number (A11181/A1278/A1342/A1534) will be silk-screened on the bottom case. If you can boot your computer, the more-specific Model Identifier is available from System Profiler, located in your /Applications/Utilities folder. The Model Identifier, which IDs the specific generation of the computer, is listed in Hardware Overview.

MacBook Core Duo Hard Drive Image

Guide

MacBook Core Duo Hard Drive Replacement

Difficulty:

Easy

5 - 30 minutes

MacBook Core 2 Duo Hard Drive Image

Guide

MacBook Core 2 Duo Hard Drive Replacement

Difficulty:

Easy

15 - 30 minutes

MacBook Unibody Model A1278 Hard Drive Image

Guide

MacBook Unibody Model A1278 Hard Drive Replacement

Difficulty:

Easy

15 - 30 minutes

MacBook Unibody Model A1342 Hard Drive Image

Guide

MacBook Unibody Model A1342 Hard Drive Replacement

Difficulty:

Moderate

10 - 30 minutes

Retina MacBook 2015 Image

Guide

Retina MacBook 2015 Teardown

Difficulty:

Moderate

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Most Helpful Answer

Jnani, you did not give us enough information. Go to this site, pick your computer and then follow the guides.

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