Unplug the SATA and power cable from the hard drive, then remove the four screws in the sides of the hard drive with the Torx T6 screwdriver.Remove the black arm, then use the pull tab to carefully lift out the hard drive.Take off the bottom cover and use the Torx T6 screwdriver to loosen the two black screws in the black arm/hinge that holds down the hard drive.I set them down in the same pattern they are installed in the MacBook. Keep track of where they go because three of them are longer than the others. Use the Phillips #00 screwdriver to remove the 10 screws on the bottom of the MacBook.Don’t just put it to sleep it must be shut down. I used createinstallmedia and a 16GB USB flash drive.

Create a bootable USB installation drive.I used an external USB drive and Time Machine to create a backup. Backup any files that you want to keep from the old hard drive.These are the steps I followed (make sure you avoid static discharge when handling the computer internals): I would like to emphasize that you should get a Phillips #00 screwdriver and a Torx T6 screwdriver if you don’t already have them.

I also picked up a Crucial 2x4GB DDR3 1066 Mac memory kit.įor the installation process, there are plenty of blogs and tutorials so I won’t go into full details here. After browsing a few discussions on Apple’s support site and reading some reviews, I ordered a Crucial M500 240GB SSD because others reported good compatibility with the specific nVidia chipset (MCP79) in this 2009 MacBook Pro 13″. Knowing that others had success with SSD and RAM upgrades in this MacBook model, I decided to pull the trigger on new hardware. I decided against that because even the best-case scenario would still be slow compared to the SSD speeds I’m used to on my personal desktop and my company MacBook with an SSD. The only “free” option that I really had left was to backup the data, reformat the hard drive, and install a fresh copy of OS X. Nothing seemed to make a difference, and after an agonizing afternoon slowly upgrading to OS X Mountain Lion, I decided to get serious about fixing the problem. This was bad even for the hardware it had, so I tried a few different solutions, including upgrading to OS X Lion, fixing disk permissions, and general hard drive cleanup (defrag, deleting applications and files that were no longer needed, etc.). From a cold boot, it took about 4 minutes to load the OS and stop thrashing the hard drive so you could open a browser or iTunes. When I first used this laptop in 2013 (four years after it was manufactured) it was running OS X Snow Leopard. A few searches online uncovered others who had similar setups and successfully upgraded them to modern performance standards with an SSD and additional RAM. While it probably worked great when it was new, five years later it had become painfully slow (#firstworldproblems) with its 2GB of RAM and 160GB HDD.

My fianc é has a 13″ MacBook Pro from 2009.

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