There are two different types of connections for your new hard drive optimizer. Take your old hard drive that you removed earlier and fit it into the new caddy. I managed to strip one and it took quite sometime to remedy my mistake.)

(NOTE: Be super careful not to strip the screws. You will see them highlighted in blue in the photo below. Remove the screws holding the optical drive in place. Step Six: Remove the Optical Drive and Replace with Optimized Hard Drive Caddy I found I needed a little extra room while completing that step. NOTE: You might want to wait to replace the support bar until after the optical drive is replaced. Lastly, take the support bar (with the two connected screws) and screw it back into place. Once screwed in, fit the SATA connection into the top of the SSD and then sit the SSD into the hard drive bay.

Grab your new SSD and screw the four screws from the old drive into the sides, the same spots where the old drive had them originally. We will be using that in the optical drive caddy later on. Once screws are out, set the hard drive to the side. Unscrew all four screws and set them to the side. Once the hard drive is free, you will see that there are four small screws sticking out of the two long sides of the hard drive. Open up System Preferences and Select 'Time Machine.' For more information about the Blu-Ray burner we bought, check out our blog on 'How to Burn a Blu-Ray with Adobe Encore and Toast Titanium'.

This does mean that we no longer have a disc drive, but seriously, when is the last time you used your optical drive?! We bought an external Blu-Ray/DVD burner recently that is tiny and portable and can actually burn Blu-Rays, so we felt like it would be a much more valuable to get rid of the disc drive and almost double our storage space. It's amazingly fast and we're not quite sure why we didn't do this sooner. We went from one 750GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM to one 1TB SSD, one 750GB HD and 16GB of RAM. It took a total of about 35 minutes to swap the old hard drive with a Sandisk Solid State Drive, add in more Crucial RAM to max it out, and swap the optical disc drive with a caddy that holds the old hard drive. This last week we supercharged our our Macbook Pro (Mid-2012) and seriously could not be more pleased. Hello everyone! Here is another how-to blog for your reading and learning pleasure.

Macbook pro mid 2012 replace hard drive