Tonight I opened up my wife’s Mid2009 MacBook Pro 13″ to upgrade the stock 5400 rpm 160GB Hitachi hard drive with a brand new Samsung 840 256GB SSD, capable of 96,000 IOPS.
This is also my first Internet based reinstall of Mountain Lion, so here is my experience as I complete this.
Needless to say, this should be a great upgrade. Here are some pictures of the guts. The interior was clean, hardly any dust in it. Great job keeping it clean honey!
Bye bye slow drive…
Since this came out before Lion, I figured the OS recovery is not on the MB, so I created a Lion Recovery USB key. Glad I did.
First thing to do was to format the SSD in Disk Utility
I have her MacBook Pro completing TimeMachine backups to the QNAP NAS. When I tried searching for it, it couldn’t find it.
No worries, lets do a clean install and we should be able to restore afterwards.
I had to validate my iTunes credentials a little later to verify I purchased Mountain Lion.
I selected the SSD I formatted in Disk Utility.
It started saying it would take 48 minutes, it ended up taking less than 30, no doubt assisted by the write speed and fast cable modem with Ethernet connection…
Then it rebooted to the actual install, 21 minutes, although that ended up taking about 18.
Next up was setup of first account
Next time I will write about restoring from the Time Machine backup.
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