Upgrading The White Macbook 2010 SSD+HDD Dual Drive

I got a used macbook 2010 white model 7.1 recently. I want to upgrade the RAM and SSD myself. Why not just buy a new one? Because this inspires me:

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The white Macbook 2010 model 7.1 is the only one in the white unibody series that can push its RAM to 16GB (although Apple officially approves maxing it at 8GB).

The 16GB (2X8GB) PC-8500 DDR3 1066MHz 204 Pin RAM is a bit hard to find. However, I learn that there is one vendor, OWC, who can officially confirm that it will work with Macbook 2010 and Macbook Pro 2010 models:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Apple_MacBook_MacBook_Pro/Upgrade/DDR3_White

At the moment the price is pretty steep (200.00 USD), so I was searching for alternative on ebay. I have tried two vendors on ebay, and both are duds, so I am still searching for the right alternative.

In the meantime, I am only upgrading from a 4GB to a 8GB RAM and also from my old Toshiba HHD to the Samsung 840-Evo 128gb SSD.

I also manage to take out the cd optical drive and replace it with the extra 320GB Toshiba hard disk drive to use as my secondary storage on mac. My reasons for making the dual drive are :

I don’t want to put the drive in a memory case and have it as an extra external HDD to lug around. (I always manage to misplace them somewhere).
There is a small possibility that the external HDD will be corrupted. This happened to me several times before, when all my important back up data was lost. It was painful so I don’t want to take the risk. Although I can’t confirm this, but I feel like securing the HDD inside the computer is more stable.
I never really use the cd optical drive, so it is a waste of space.
HDD provides the extra 320gb space for backup data storage such as movies, videos, files, etc. which might clutter my 128gb SSD. This leaves me room to install programs that require more speed and performance like Photoshop and my ruby web developing environment.
Buying a larger GB on the SSD is pricy, while it is much better to recycle my HDD.

Result:

I notice tremendous boost in speed, especially during boot-up time. My pre-updated macbook with 4gb RAM took about 60 seconds long to boot (but it actually takes 2–5 minutes of waiting time for the mac start running tasks), and it was painfully sluggish to open tabs on Mavericks. The updated version took about 15 seconds to boot. Photoshop CS6 and Illustrator CS6 took 5–6 seconds to start. I still have my zippy i7 Ivy Bridge Core 2.90 Ghz Sony VAOI with 12.0GB of RAM with a HDD memory as a main laptop, and I really don’t notice a big performance difference while switching between two laptops.

Reflections:

The purpose of modding my Mac was more of a learning process for me. I stumbled on many road blocks: my RAM failed several times, the optical drive had several hidden screws that I need to located, and I had to watch several tutorial videos on different macbook versions, since mine wasn’t available. As a result, I have learn several skills along the way, which I haven’t anticipated, but will be useful for in future:

I learn to create a bootable USB disk for Mavericks
I learn to swap the SDD with HDD, and to swap the optical disk with another SDD or HDD drive
I learn that despite what apple has told me, people in the forums can push their RAM to 16GB for this particular model.
I learn to use the right tools to update not just this particular Mac, but to generalize the process in order to fix future computers.
But most importantly, I enjoy the whole process.

My unibody Macbook Mid-2010 Model 7.1

Swapping my old HDD with a new Samsung SSD (lower right corner). The optical disk driver is the silver section on the left side.

Using a second HDD caddy for about 10 bucks from Amazon to pop the old Toshiba HDD in.

Now, the Toshiba HDD is in place, swap this caddy with the optical drive on mac. (This is the tricky part).

Voila!

And….after booting Mavericks from my USB for a fresh OS installation–IT WORKS!

Sources:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20073012-263/extending-macbook-pro-speed-and-capacity-with-dual-drive-upgrades/