Is it a very bad idea to replace the hdd on my MBP while under Apple Care?

Do it, it will take you about 10 minutes. You can check out the process at iFixit.com under guides. As for voiding your warranty, I wouldn't worry about until you have to cross that path.

I swapped out the HHD on my refurbished MBP the day I received it.

As kirbdog just said do it, get yourself an enclosure download say superduper clone over OS X to the external & swap them over, as for voiding your warranty simple trick replace with original drive should you ever need to take it in for repair or screw something up in the process of the swap

As for the 320GB yes thats possible or you could go even bigger what with 500GB drives available now try the samsung m6,just make sure whatever you chose is 2.5mm & 9.5mm thick with a SATA connection

Don't worry about it just do it, their are shed loads of people who do this without problems including me, yes the samsung will work as its a standard size lappy drive just google samsung m6 500GB 2.5mm HDD

A Genius told me numerous times that as long as I did not break anything during installation, I would be fine.

I ended up taking my old iMac with a replaced hard drive in for a new logic board via Apple Care at the Apple Store, and not a word was ever spoken of it.

Save the old drive, and swap it back in if you're mailing it back to Apple, just to be on the safe side. From reading over the warranty, it appears that while technically you should be fine unless you break something, it also appears that technically Apple might be able to refuse service if they chose to because of a hard drive that's been added.

Of course, if this is a new MBP, that's really not an issue at all, in which case I'd go for it (but then you likely wouldn't be doing that unless you were going to put in an SSD anyways).

jW

i did it on my 2 weeks old MBP. if you're careful then there is no problem. keep the old drive and put it back in in case you need to send it in for a repair.

just make sure you have a Torx T6 screw driver! if not a steak knive will do.

i put in a 320GB seagate momentus 7200rpm. it is fast but you feel a much stronger vibration than from the original 5400rpm HD.

peapody said:

Great advice guys!

I am really looking forward to running boot camp but I can't wrap my mind around how to get this done. I have CCC and time machine back ups, so I guess I could remove hdd, do a fresh install with boot camp splitting the drives...plug in my old hdd and clone the external over to the new partition in the MBP. Would that work?

I am looking forward to running XP and Leopard, since my school won't let me do certain things with OSX. Also, One Note is a lifesaver.

Click to expand...

You don't need to do a freash install of OS X. The Boot Camp tool will dynamically repartition your drive. So your steps are:

1. CCC original mac drive to a backup drive (it sounds like you have an external driver for this already).

2. Install new hard drive

3. Boot to the external drive (have it plugged in by USB or Firewire when you start up the machine.

4. Format the new drive as one partition

5. CCC from backup to the new internal drive.

6. Reboot--this time to the new internal drive.

7. Run the Boot Camp tool to install XP. At the first step you choose how large a boot camp partition to make. You should have plenty of space now that you have your new, larger drive in there. Make sure you make the Windows partition big enough because it's a pain to change its size later. (Last I checked, you'd have to recreate it).

Some variants:

You could skip step 1, if you have an external enclosure you can put your existing hard drive in to, but I always like extra backups when doing this kind of thing.

By the way, I've done this operation, too, and all you really need is an appropriate screw driver and work space and patience. Use an egg carton or ice cube tray to keep track of the screws--makes it easy to put the right screws back in the right places. Just keep it out of reach of your elbow.

peapody said:

Oh and I am looking at this drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136280

320gb 7200rpm 16mb cache. or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152114

samsung m6 500gb 5400rpm 8mb cache

The samsung m6 is just 30 dollars more and I am slightly torn. I plan on using my MBP as a total media center so bigger the hdd the better. However, I am not fond of noise or added heat (the Ati X1300 card is hot enough); and I like the idea of a speedier drive since my computer is on the lower MBP end relatively (2.16ghz 3gb RAM). I have 200gb of music and movies and plan on collecting more.

What do you guys think?

Click to expand...

I think the 16MB of Cache is a better drive and will be faster in most instances. But, if you really need the space then buy the other as most of the time it's not really necessary to be 5ms faster.