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Trouble with SSD/HDD in Macbook Pro Mid 2009

I have a mid 2009 15" 2.53 GHz MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM and a 250 GB HDD. Recently, I purchased a WD 1TB 2.5" 5400 hard drive to upgrade. I used SuperDuper! and made a clone of internal drive to new drive via USB. After swapping the two drives, my laptop became very slow. Spinning beach ball appeared very often, almost everywhere. Did extended Apple hardware test, all ok.

Then I put back the original 250 GB HDD in my MacBook Pro and took out the new one and things are fine again.

I found this post with the same problem. Sounds like I am stuck; I can't upgrade my internal HDD?

Has anybody successfully upgraded their HDD? I want to upgrade to SSD, but this time I want to make sure it will work before making a purchase!

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I would recommend buying a hard drive from (eshop.macsales.com/…). No matter what hard drive you buy from them it will work in a mac. – Stephen Oct 18 '12 at 20:29
It seems like the answer you seek is the post you found ... – jmk Oct 18 '12 at 20:37

marked as duplicate by patrix♦, Mark, Stu Wilson, CajunLuke, Nathan Greenstein♦ Oct 19 '12 at 19:44

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I upgraded this model to a 480gb SSD but I had to do two things. First, I replaced the disk drive cable with a new cable for 2010 MBP 15" from iFixit. Second, per OWC, I used an SATA2 rather than an SATA3 drive.

Testing showed the cable replacement was absolutely required. I didn't have an SATA3 drive to test against so I'm taking that one on faith.

Assuming your replacement drive is an SATA2 drive, you just need to replace the cable. It's not hard but e careful with the screws that attach the cable to the body. I stripped one and it was a PITA.

It's a whole new machine with an SSD. Very fast for everything except CPU-intensive stuff like encoding video.

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