Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place.

The whole procedure took less than an hour (not counting the half a day it took to clone my MacBook's hard drive to the SSD). I replaced my 2011-era MacBook Pro's 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. And they aren't nearly as costly per gigabyte as they once were. They are more energy efficient, more reliable and quieter than hard drives with magnetic, spinning disks. There's a reason that all modern MacBooks and the vast majority of all laptops sold today use SSDs. Get the best upgrades you can today for your MacBook Pro orders so you can future proof your purchase.If you have an old MacBook Pro with one foot in the grave, the single best thing you can do to breathe new life into it is replace its traditional spinning hard drive with a solid-state drive. It’s disappointing to think once your SSD dies, you’ll have to pay Apple to replace it, instead of being able to do it on your own. It also means it’s important to keep your data backed up to the cloud or via Time Machine, as once the drive perishes you won’t be able to extract the data yourself. It means you won’t be able to upgrade your SSD, since the latter is soldered to the motherboard.

While we are still awaiting more complex teardowns from OWC and iFixit, this is not a good sign for MacBook Pro with Touch Bar users. Now, according to early unboxing and dismantling of 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar, some MacRumors readers are discovering the SSD is non-removable in these versions, just like the 12-inch MacBook. They discovered there was a removable solid state drive (SSD) module, giving hope for users to upgrade their hard drives at some point in time. Last month, OWC tore down the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, non-Touch Bar version.

Can you upgrade macbook pro hard drive