I recently ran out of hard drive space on my Apple MacBook.  My huge iPhoto library was the culprit.  So I found a great deal on a hard drive and swapped it out with the one in the MacBook.  Below is a walk through on upgrading your MacBook hard drive, and ending up with a spare external drive to boot!

Step by step MacBook hard drive upgrade:

Get a new 2.5″ drive

Get a 2.5″ SATA drive and 2.5″ external case (USB and/or Firewire).  Note: newer MacBooks no longer have a firewire port so be sure to get the correct external case for your needs.  The MacBook’s internal drive is a 2.5″  SATA drive.  I found a 250GB model for a little over $100.  While buying the drive, I picked up a USB external case for the old drive, so I could use it as a backup drive and for transferring the data.

Format new hard drive

Put the new drive in the external case and format it using Disk Utility, located in the Utilities folder.  Be sure to select GUID Partition Table which ensures bootability with Intel based macs.

Backup the old drive

Now it is time to transfer data to the new hard drive.  I recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner to backup your internal drive to the new external.  Though CCC is easy to use and free, it does have some advertisements which rotate while the backups are proceeding.

When the backup is complete, you can actually go to your system preferences and select the external drive as your boot drive to test it out by rebooting.  Once you’re confident the backup is good to go, power down and unplug your MacBook.

Switch the drives

It is now time to switch the drives.  You’ll need a coin, small philips screwdriver and a T8 Torx screwdriver.   Pull the external drive out of the case.  Open the MacBook’s battery lock (coin) and remove the battery. Remove the L shaped metal plate shown in the left image below.