Safety first though! Read on for details. Once you’ve gathered the hardware and tools you need, you can get started with the upgrade. PH-000 screwdriver to open your MacBook Pro and a T6 Torx head screwdriver to disassemble the hard drive assembly, standard issue for many MacBook Pro Repair Kits like this one.A 2.5-inch SATA SSD (I used a 480GB Kingston A400).To do this upgrade, you’re going to need a few things: What’s more, you can do it yourself using a couple of tools and some time. It’s now so economical to replace the 2.5-inch factory-installed HDD with an SSD that it’s crazy not to do it. Solid State Drives (SSDs) have come way down in price over the last few years. If your Mac is running with the same spinning hard disk drive (HDD) it came with, it’s about time to replace it. Any 2.5-inch SSD with a SATA interface should be a plug-and-play replacement for the hard drive that came with your Mac. While the specifications of each of these Macs is different, the actual architecture of them is similar enough that the same rules apply when it comes to taking them apart and upgrading them. This same hardware design is shared by quite a few different 13-inch MacBook Pro models. Here’s a list of the specific Mac models that this SSD installation tutorial is applicable to: I did an SSD upgrade for mine and it’s running like greased lightning. If you’re on a tight hardware budget, or like me, you’ve acquired one of these old workhorses for cheap and you’re willing to put a little bit of coin and some elbow grease to get it running well, the payoff is tremendous. One of the best performance upgrades you can give your MacBook Pro is to replace the stock hard disk drive with an SSD.

If you have one and you’re looking to get some more bang for your buck, it’s possible with relatively little muss and fuss to upgrade them to keep them going a while longer while making them much faster than they ever were from the factory.

There are a lot of pre-Retina Display equipped 13-inch MacBook Pros still in service.

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