A 500GB drive in my MacBook Pro? Heck yeah!

I'm perpetually running out of disk space on my computers. If you follow me on Twitter (I'm @DaveTaylor), you've probably seen me every so often send out a message asking about this, that or the other upgrade path for one of my computers because things are filling up.

That's why when I saw that TechRestore was offering a 500GB internal drive upgrade path for my trusty MacBook Pro, I was quite interested. My existing drive at the time was only 149GB in size (that's actual usable size) and it was about 90% full, and that was with me sporadically pruning everything.

I contacted Shannon Jean at TechRestore and asked if they'd run an upgrade for me so I could see how the process worked, in return for me sharing the experience with you, my readers, and they agreed.

Here's how it went...

Within a few hours, I had received both an invoice and shipping instructions. The invoice indicated that the total cost for the hard drive upgrade would be $367.99, which included the $299 drive upgrade, a $29.99 overnight return shipping charge and an additional $39.99 charge to put my old drive in a slim external case so I could continue to use the little guy.

Shipping instructions gave me the all-important order ID and the address of their facility in Concord, California.

I dutifully packed up my Apple MacBook Pro in its original box, then packed that in a bigger box with bubblewrap to ensure that it all survived the trip without incident. The local shipping store helped me get it out the door with second-day shipping from UPS for about $25 and it was out of my hands on Thursday of last week.

Two day shipping at the end of the week of course means it's actually delivered on Monday, and the computer arrived at their facility that morning. They streamed all the data onto the new drive, put the old drive in a very attractive, slim leather external USB-powered case and shipped it back out the same day.

Tuesday I received notice from FedEx that they'd tried to deliver it but I wasn't home, so I had them hold it at my local shipping depot, and Wednesday morning by noon I had the computer back in my hands, big, big drive in place.

Here's what it looked like before the upgrade:

As you can see, not so much room. To see the exact specs of the drive, I tapped the useful "Get Info" command:

which revealed that the old drive was:

Not so big, pretty darn full.

After the upgrade, the new drive had much better numbers:

And, of course, with the same data, the available space is now just massive:

A nice, simple, effective upgrade. Is it worth paying almost $400 for a much larger disk in my MacBook Pro? I would say a qualified "yes": if you don't need all the space all the time and can handle an external drive, you can definitely get just as much space in an external drive for less (I found an iomega 500GB external for around $100 thorugh Google) but if you prefer to travel clean and neat, don't want yet more additional peripheral junk to tote, and just love the idea of having your entire music library, photo library and those three feature films you're developing all neatly tucked into the machine itself, it's a wonderful upgrade!

Finally, if you are interested in the upgrade, Shannon gave me a couple of coupon codes to check out:

• Take $50 off the 500GB 7200 service with coupon code "DTAYLOR" exp 5/31/09.
• Use coupon code "TWEET" to save $10 off the upgrade service.

If you're going to jump and it's not yet June 1, $50 is a nice savings!