After having upgraded my older, out-of-warranty MacBook Pro to a 200GB, 7200RPM hard drive a few months ago, I spotted a great item on sale at Costco. It was the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB external 2.5″ hard drive. The regular price was $170, and I got it for $140. As soon as I got it home, I took it apart so I could put it to proper use – inside my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro.
Here are some pics showing the process of taking the WD Passport Elite drive apart.
Here’s the prey in its natural habitat:
A credit card or thick fingernail is the best tool for prying the wide edge open. There are quite a few notches – very tough, very resistant to force. Careful, or *snap*, the case will break!
You can see the notches that hold the case together.
Because the case wants to snap back together, it’s necessary to hold it apart from all angles. I used four credit/gift cards to do the trick.
Here’s the center frame extruded from the outer case.
All the parts…
As you can see, the drive inside is a Western Digital 320GB SATA drive with a 5400RPM rotational speed. These drives sell for $130 to $170 online, and for much, much more in retail stores.
Here you can see the SATA drive separated from the tiny little SATA-USB controller. This controller works fine on its own. You can use it with or without the WD enclosure.
BONUS PICS:
I dropped the 320GB drive into my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro. It formats to 298.09GB. So far, I’ve got 219GB free. Wow.
Close-up inside the MacBook Pro…
Another close-up inside the MacBook Pro. I like the paper-thin SATA interface.
FINAL WORDS:
What I like about the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB is that it’s a great hard drive for laptop use. It’s much cheaper than a generic OEM drive. The outer case is flat-out awesome – better than most 2.5″ cases you can buy online for $50 or more. An additional perk – the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB case is 100% bus-powered. No need for an external power supply or dual-USB cable setup to power the drive. I’m very happy with this purchase.
Caveat: moving from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive can result in a slow-down here and there, but I’ve found that this 320GB drive is pretty swift on its feet so far. Boot time is only 3-4 seconds slower, Photoshop runs roughly the same and only video conversion seems significantly affected (by about 20%). All else is good.
Good Blog. I will continue reading it in the future. Nice layout too.
Aaron Wakling
Hey i was wondering if this drive makes a clicking noise. I have head that every 30 seconds or so it makes a very loud noise. Thanks
Hi Fahad,
So far, I have not heard any uncommon noises from this WD 320GB drive. No clicking, no ticking. It’s been very quiet and runs cool.
I hope that helps.
Jason
That’s a neat idea. I’d never have guessed it would fit like an OEM drive. Does the MBP’s motion sensor work for an install like this?
Hey Doug -
The accelerometer in the MBP will control/cease head movement on any compatible SATA hard drive, not just a particular brand. It shouldn’t matter which drive is used. There have been reports of some drives being extra sensitive to the Sudden Motion Sensor control, but I haven’t experienced this.
The best way to test whether your SMS system is functioning is to try a fee app like “Splash”. Here’s the link on versiontracker.com:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31405
As for this particular WD drive, it’s just like any other SATA laptop drive – same size, specs, etc. Just check the model number of the drive.
This HDD swap is just an ingenious way of getting an awesome laptop hard drive and a sleek, high-quality portable enclosure for major savings.
Jason
I was looking to do exactly this and wasn’t sure if those Passports could be pried open. Thanks for the pics!
Did you place another hd back into the case successfully? I plan to put my MBs 160gb back in, I just hope I don’t break anything…
Hey Luke – I was able to pop my MBP’s 160GB drive into the WD enclosure. Once the enclosure is actually opened, it loosens up a little bit, so dropping a replacement drive in there is pretty simple. If you decide to extract the 320GB drive from the WD enclosure, just be sure to take your time – don’t rush things. It’ll also help if the drive enclosure is a little warm (sit on it or put it under your armpit for a bit) as warm-ish plastic is much less brittle than cold plastic.
Good luck! =)
HELP! Please!
I can’t get the original Macbook Pro 160 GB hard drive to be recognized (power on!) when I try to use it with the Elite’s SATA adapter!
There are no jumpers to remove or move, to address the possible need for the “low power” option (as the original 320 GB hard drive does).
Anyone know how to get it work? Did I miss something? All the connections are tight and when I plug the USB connector into the powered USB hub, the lights on the SATA adapter flash on and then go off. When I unplug the drive’s cable (either from the back of the adapter or from the USB hub) it seems to power down.
hey jason.
was the speed comparison relative to the original hard drive or the 7200 hard drive you put in?
Rex – good question. The final mention of boot times being 3-4 seconds slower, etc. (prefixed by “caveat”) is a comparison to the 7200 RPM drive, not the original 160GB 5400RPM drive.
WOW u have been a real help!
thank you very much please do more! hahaha
Bought the Samsung 320GB because it was way cheapier. 110$ with taxes & shipping, instead of the 147$ with taxes & warehouse pickup at Costco.
Bonus: no enclosure to pop open!
Alright.. what to do with the 120 GB then? Upgrade the the 60GB macbook. And then? Oh well… why bother with 60GB these days.
Just a stupid question… Does anyone have one of the sata to usb interfaces to sell off? I’m just trying to fix one of the drives that my daughter bent all the usb pins on.
Just used this guide plus the iFixit instructions and swapped my 160Gb MBP HD for my 320Gb WD Passport HD. Went well except the ACLs in my user got messed up, which always seems to happen to my user when restoring from a CCC or SuperDuper clone. My wife and kids users have no problems. Oh well, I just wiped my user, recreated it, and copied everything back over from the 160Gb drive now in the WD Passport case. Now off to buy a 500Gb WD Passport for Time Machine. Thanks!
Thanks for the instruction. I just got a 320GB Passport Essential (a x’mas gift from myself). After seeing those youtube videos of disassembling, thought it would be not a big deal to open the passport. Turned out the later model and thank God found your side.
Unfortunately, I think mine is probably an even later model and the operation turned out to be more miserable. Seems like WD intentionally made it almost impossible to pry open. At last, I had to knowingly break two clicks/hooks, one on each side. Now it’s cloning with SuperDuper. Hope the installation into my almost 3 years old MBP (with 80GB) is not a big headache.
Thanks again for the comprehensive instruction.
Andre
Hey Andre – I’ll bet you it’s the same model. The WD case really is pretty resistant to tampering – sort of like the thick plastic ‘clamshell’ packaging that some electronics come in. A box cutter or blowtorch is a likely candidate for opening the darn things (not the WD case, mind you).
Anyway, good luck with the new drive. It should work quite well.
Hey Jason,
I am now cloning MacBook Pro (2006) 80gb drive to a WD 500 gb drive I bought at Costco today and just found your site. Great Tutorial and great comments.
I’ll be prying open both the MBP and WD drive when its done to expand the beast’s capacity (along with upgrading to 802.11n airport card).
Thanks greatly for sharing your experience. With it (and your photos), I’m now pretty confident mine will go well.
Tex,
I’m happy to throw some tips your way. Hopefully your upgrade went smoothly.
Jason
Just wanted to confirm that I successfully completed this operation on my MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz of late 2006 (120GB Apple-supplied Hitachi HD). The original MacBook’s 120GB was swapped into the Passport and mounts successfully, no jumper changes required. Even though I broke some of those obnoxiously strong internal casing clips on the 400GB Passport Elite, it snapped back together easily and looks like new.
Thanks Jason for providing a useful reference for this operation. And thanks to the people behind SATA for making a fast & easy to use standard!
I also upgraded my Macbook Pro, from the stock 160gb Hitachi to the 500gb Western Digital. After the swap, I noticed my computer took much longer to boot up, almost twice as long. The display was stuck on the grey screen for a long time before the Apple logo and spinning wheel appeared. After I logged in, the system seemed faster.
A quick search on the web revealed some advice to reset the PRAM while booting, with Command-Option-P-R. This did the trick, and my boot time to the login screen is now 43% faster, dropping from 47 seconds to 27 seconds. I ran X-Bench on the new drive, and it confirms my observations. Most of the disk access scores were much higher, almost twice the speed of the stock drive. Only the Uncached Read of 4K blocks held flat. The overall composite increased from a 38.27 to 57.49. Not bad for a drive that has the same speed and cache as the stock drive.
Hi K,
Thanks for that info. It’s really great to hear that you had such good results. The PRAM reset is a crucial step whenever a Mac computer slows down or has long boot times. You may also want to try downloading the latest release of Onyx from versiontracker.com. It’s got a number of system cleaning routines. Very, very helpful.
I’m curious about your 160GB drive. Was it 5400RPM or 7200RPM? I’m about to upgrade the 320GB 7200RPM drive in my MBP to the WD 500GB 5400RPM drive. I need the extra 180GB and $129 at Costco is hard to say no to. =)
Hey Jason.
The stock drive was a 160GB 5400rpm Hitachi, model HTS541616J9SA00. The data sheet says this drive has an 8mb buffer, regardless of their model guide, https://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/newnum.htm, that suggests the 2nd to last digit represents the buffer size.
The new WD drive is a WD5000BEVT, 5400rpm, 8mb buffer, and a SATA3 interface. Since my Macbook drive controller is only SATA1.5, the higher interface doesn’t help me out.
I’ve read on other sites that even going from a 7200rpm to a 5400rpm, you probably won’t notice a difference in day to day use. Something to do with the number of platters and read heads. Your mileage may vary.
Also, I’ve read about clicking noises with the WD drive and kernal panics. Something about WD drives having their own motion sensor competing with Apples motion sensor. I couldn’t confirm this though, and mine’s running flawlessly so far.
Good luck.
Hey, Jason!
Great instructions! I did this on a Toshiba laptop with XP on it. I formatted the Passport (to clear off the enclosed software on it), cloned my 250 gb hard drive to the 500 gb Passport and then did the switcheroo. No sweat! The only “problem” was that it was so easy, I didn’t get to really enjoy performing the surgery. I had the drives swapped in about 10 minutes! Worked like a charm! MANY THANKS for your explicit instructions and step-by-step photos! FANTASTIC!
Cheers~
Jaxon
Hi,
I am looking for a Philips 7FF1Aw digital photo frame but am currently struggling to find one anywhere, or to find anywhere that has a good review. Do you know anywhere you can point me to that will provide one of these please?
Many thanks
Patrick,
Those digital frames are pretty old – made in 2005/2006. Here are three resources:
http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/20/philips-7ff1aw-digital-photo-display-review/
http://www.refurbdepot.com/productdetails2.cfm?Product_ID=4726&&refererid=Nextag&site=www.nextag.com
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-Clear-Digital-Frame%252d-7FF1AW%252f37/dp/B000F7SSWA
Good luck!
Jason – great tutorial, pleasure to read (actually to watch since pictures say it all). I have only one question: the obvious thing to do is to put the old drive inside the case to have a portable external drive. but can the case handle a 7200rpm drive ? can the USB port power that kind of drive ? what about heat ? I guess there is a reason why all WD passport line is 5400rpm, even the most expensive one.
Hi Zohar,
There’s no trouble connecting a 7,200rpm laptop hard drive to the USB port of the MacBook Pro. So long as it’s a 2.5″ drive, there’s enough bus power to properly spin the drive. I have both 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm external drives that I use via USB. You can use external enclosures that are bus powered (like the one all the Western Digital Passport drives come in) or any powered enclosure. There’s no heat issue, either. The only thing you absolutely can’t run on bus power is a 3.5″ desktop drive – that would need a powered enclosure.
In my present MacBook Pro (unibody, 2008), I switch between two hard drives – a nice Hitachi 7,200rpm 320GB drive and the Western Digital 5,400rpm 500GB drive. Both are awesome, both work flawlessly with the MacBook and MacBook Pro.
I hope this info helps a little. =)
Is the internal drive the same as this one? WD5000BEVT
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314
Considering either waiting for the ST 7.2K momentus 500GB, Getting the Newegg at $99 or doing this procedure by buying at local costco (as I can put my existing 320GB into the enclosure…) if it is equivalent to the WD5000BEVT
Many thanks !
Hi Miguel,
Yes, the 500GB WD drive you linked to is essentially the same hard drive as the one available at Costco. The only downside is the 5400RPM speed. Personally, I’m anxious for this 7200RPM 500GB drive to be available on Newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148374
I still have 100GB free on my drive, so I don’t really need the 500GB version, but it just looks so awesome! It’s supposedly going to be available in late May or early June.
i found that once i had taken it apart there was no SATA to USB converting bit, which is what i had been looking for to temporarily access the data on my broken passport drive, so wasted my time and damaged my brand new drive lol, oh well.
Hey Dan – that sounds very odd. Would you mind taking a photo of the inside of the drive? The drive is either defective (incomplete manufacturing) or the SATA/USB controller was somehow overlooked.
No the new Passports Essential(not sure about Passport Elites yet, I’m going to go buy one today to find out) have an all in one motherboard on the hard drive that his the HDD controller plus the USB adapter.
I bought the Passport to rip it apart to put the HDD inside of my Wii actually (getting rid of the dvd drive… who uses those things these days?) and sadly it was all in one so going to take it back and buy an elite and I’ll let you know.
I’ll upload a picture here of the Passport Essential.
http://www.sockrocket.com/temp/passportBack.jpg
http://www.sockrocket.com/temp/passportFront.jpg
Hey Jocko – thanks for the pics! It looks like those sneaker effers at Western Digital switched things up a bit. That really takes the life out of an incredibly worthy mod. Hopefully they didn’t screw up the new Passport Elite hardware.
Jason
Hi Jason,
Thanks for the great instructions. Looking to change my 100Gb (toshiba mk1032gsx) drive for a larger one as it is full and can’t decide what drive to get. I had ordered a WD5000BEVT but I have just seen that it only has an 8Mb cache vs the 16Mb on that is in my machine now. Does this make a difference? I am not too fussed to move up to 7200rpm as I don’t want my machine to chew any more battery as it is pretty old already.
Any advice on what drive to choose? Thanks
Hey George,
Definitely look for drives with 16MB cache or more. Generally speaking, those higher-cached drives are going to be much more responsive for basic computing tasks, and even for some hard-core operations like video editing, etc. Of course, 7,200RPM is going to be better than 5,400RPM. Typically battery life isn’t dramatically affected by a faster spinning drive – maybe a 10% reduction or so. If you can live with that, I’d go for a faster drive. If you still want to retain the most off-mains minutes, then stick to a 5,400RPM drive with as much cache as possible.
I hope that helps a little.
Jason
I believe some updated “My Passports” models have integrated the USB port and no longer use a removable SATA-USB controller.
According to an article at http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=0&t=1192095 if the drive is identified by “BBB” it has the updated USB port built-in. If it is identified as “A7B” or “B7B”, is should be usable within the context of this article. This identifier may be found on the exterior case of “My Passport” just after the S/N as the R/N.
Thanks for your work in putting this excellent tutorial together, Jason.
Hey J.B. – thanks for that info!! Extremely useful data for folks to have when buying the WD drives. I’m in need of another drive, so I’ll be sure to look for A7B or B7B.
Jason
Found your site really helpful. My wd3200me was plugged into an incorrectly powered belkin hub (15V instead of 5V) and stopped working. When plugged in drive does not show and led is on constant, no longer flashes first. My wd has b8b does that mean the drive is now useless? Any help is appreciated, thanx.
DaM1 – if the Belkin hub was powered incorrectly, it’s possible that the WD drive could have been damaged. Have you tried plugging the drive directly into more than one laptop or desktop computer and not via a USB hub? If it still doesn’t work, I’d call WD support for some help. Maybe they can replace it for you if it’s under 1 year old. As for the B8B model, that should have nothing to do with the drive’s ability to turn on or spin up. Good luck! Hopefully WD gives you some good service.
Hi Jason,
I followed your instructions and was able to successfully remove the drive from my passport elite 500gb (R/N A7B).
I did break a couple of the clips, and if I had known more about the locking mechanism inside, I would’ve known that you want to pry the black section out and away from the grey, rather prying the grey up and away from the black (breaking clips in the process). Just in case you want to include it in your post.
Cheers,
Arya
hello ,
I’have just bought a WD my passport (essencial) but it was a 8b8 is there anny possybility to put it in my mac book ? :s
WD my passport cannot be recognized by my Mac book. Can anyone tell me why?
I’ve got a WD 500 gb Passport Elite drive that I used ‘plug & play’ on a PC for backup for a while. Very little space used. Now I’ve changed to an IMac. Can I just plug the USB into the IMac and continue to use? Don’t ever need to access the data put on during PC use. Not much documentation came with the WD drive so haven’t found out whether I can just plug it in or whether changes must be made.
Thanks.
Hey Lloyd,
If the drive is formatted as NTFS, then you won’t be able to use it on your iMac without buying some software to make it compatible. Pain in the butt. If the drive is FAT32, then you’re all set. If it is NTFS, then my suggestion would be to get the drive onto a Windows machine and back up the existing data, then format it as FAT32, then move data back.
The quickest way to tell if the drive is FAT32 is to simply drag a file from your iMac to the drive. If it copies over, then you’re good. If it won’t copy or if it gives an error, then you probably have an NTFS drive and a simple fix.
Jason
Hi Jason;
Many thanks for the quick response. Just plugged it in and it worked like a charm, stepping me through deleting the old files and current set up for timed backups.
Thanks again,
Lloyd
Jason;
Another (perhaps dumb) question about connecting My Passport Elite to my IMac. Connected, installed as ‘Time Machine’, and appears to have worked to back up all data. However, when I plug into a PC, it doesn’t seem to recognize the drive.
Should I have installed in a different mode other than ‘Time Machine’ since it should work on both Mac or PC equipment?
Many thanks, Lloyd
Hi Lloyd,
The problem is in the Time Machine formatting of that drive. Once you ok’d Time Machine to use that drive for backups, it changes the drive from Windows-friendly FAT32 to a Mac-only format called Mac OS Extended. Time Machine sort of hijacks the drive and won’t let go until you reformat it as FAT32 and then tell Time Machine to bugger off.
If you wan the Time machine backups, which many people do, one thing you could do is format the drive in two partitions – one partition with about 300GB for Time Machine (you can even name the partition “TimeMachineBackups”) and the remaining 200GB for Windows/Mac transfers – FAT32 formatting, of course.
Once the partitions are created, allow Time Machine to capture the 300GB partition and the 200GB partition will be spared for other uses.
Jason
Thank You very much. My Wd my passport reseted self an can’t connecting again. After this article I connected him inside computer with reduction 3,5 to 2,5 and work super. When i will need again external hard disk then i can buy case 2,5.
I have a WD 5000BMVV LBA976 I damaged the usb pins, is there any way to connect it to a notebook to reteive the data?
Love your site..great content and resources. Keep up the good work.
I wanted to do the same
with an old gateway with amd 3200+
I had a 160gb WD passport from costco
unfortunately, after disassembly the passport is sata. While the old laptop is ide.
i have external hard drive model numberWDBABV5000AB…500 GB
i found a problem it could not be detected in my laptop. the LED still lights, very important data is present in it pleses help me its urgent at least i want my data……
i want my data its very important nd urgent please reply soon