Upgrade Your Laptop With External Hard Drive Swap

If you’ve got a MacBook past warranty and are looking for more hard drive space, Seattlite Tim Molter offers a detailed step-by-step guide to a do-it-yourself upgrade with photos. His method is particularly clever because rather than buying a blank drive, Molter just buys an inexpensive USB external drive, which allowed him to both create a fully bootable backup from his original drive and provided an enclosure for his old hard drive—all for less than half the cost of an upgrade from Apple. The old drive makes for a handy complete backup or can be sold on classified ad or auction sites for the equivalent of a cash-back trade-in once cleaned up. The same general idea will work with any laptop with a 2.5″ hard drive (which is most of them), and doesn’t involve any tools more complicated than a small screwdriver.