Macbook late 2008 SSD upgrade

Macbook SSD upgrade

With only 2GByte of RAM and an out-of-support El Capitan (OSX 10.11), the 12 year old MacBook is somewhere between "ready for recycling" and "too good to waste". Over time it had become unbearably sluggish. So with prior good results on Windows PCs from the same era, I decided to give it a go.

It is super easy and reasonably safe even for intrepid  beginners.

SSD selection

I tend to go for maior brands whenever affordable. Amazon had a 500GByte Samsung 860 EVO for cheap on Black Friday 2020, so that ist the SSD of choice. The person using the Mac as a mail and browse machine will never even come near the full capacity of that disk.

Preparations / backup

A full time machine backup on an external USB drive is all it takes to recover the installation to a new SSD.

Physical installation

These old devices are built to last and to be serviced: Just remove the bottom cover (unlock with lever). Remove the disk holder (black plastic bar) with a small Phillips screw driver and lift out the old disk by the pull-tab.

Carefully remove the SATA connector from the left side of the old hard disk.

Remove the four small bolts that held the disk in place and install them on the new SSD

Reconnect the SATA connector

Insert the SSD and fix it with the plastic bar.

Close the battery/harddisk cover.

SSD preparation

Attach the USB drive with the Time Machine backup to a USB port.

After a little wait, the MacBook will boot from the USB drive.

A menue comes up: There choose the hard disk utility and add a partition to the SSD (accept the first file system option).

Go back to the previous menu

Restore from Time Machine Backup

Choose your Time Machine Backup Disk and select the latest backup.

Wait for the restore to complete

Wait for the restore to finish and reboot

Tell the Mac where to boot from

It speeds up the boot process a lot when you set the new SSD as the boot device in the settings. Otherwise it takes a while to find bootable devices.

That relatively cheap upgrade saved the nearly unuseable machine from the junk yard. With only two 1GByte RAM modules installed, the next option is to go for more memory. With the last published firmware version, this machine supports up to 8GByte.