MacBook’s Hot Swappable Hard Drive

Tutorials
June 21, 2006
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Another reason to consider buying a MacBook over a MacBook Pro is a little known feature that Apple has made an official user DIY upgrade. For the first time, Apple has released an Apple portable that comes with a hot swappable hard drive bay.

Unfortunately, the MacBook is the only Mac portable that sports this feature, making the difficult decision between purchasing a MacBook Pro or a MacBook all the more confusing.

At press time, the only remaining differences between the MacBook and MacBook Pro range remains, (i) the graphics card, (ii) an extra 2″ of screen real estate on the MacBook Pro, (iii) the MacBook Pro’s aluminium form factor, (iv) the nominal additional I/O ports on the MacBook Pro and (v) the MacBook Pro’s additional ability to install and run Apple Pro apps. All of which, make the substantial price differential between the MacBook and MacBook Pro, a difficult justification for the average consumer.

One of the unsupported uses of such a bay, is the option to create 2 hard drives. One installed with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and the other with an entire Windows XP operating system. In theory, this negates the use of the issue plagued Boot Camp beta and allows native booting in either operating system by switching out the relevant hard drive.

All that needs to be done, is to remove the L-bracket that hides the RAM bay and any user has access to their MacBook’s hard drive. The hard drive can then be gently removed by tugging on the white tab.

You can get full instructions on this procedure at Apple’s MacBook support site.