Definite noticeable improvement in responsiveness

Mijn probleem

My MacBook Pro is three years old, and I have 8GB of RAM. It worked fairly well, but I was running out of space on my factory 500GB HDD and my system was SUPER slow, especially when launching applications I use every day like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

Mijn oplossing

Installation was a cinch using the toolkit and instructions on iFixIt. I am very happy with the value I got from them in this regard. My only problem is that either my old HDD died or the little enclosure I received from iFixIt died—my suspicion lies with the enclosure, since it's nothing fancy. It worked at first, but I haven't had time to troubleshoot it thoroughly and contact the company, and I lack another drive to test the enclosure. Thankfully, I had a TimeMachine backup which recovered everything critical, and OS installation went without a hitch.

Mijn advies

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP...OF EVERYTHING. As I mentioned, the TimeMachine backup worked perfectly, and OS install was painless when I found a HowTo on clean-installing OS X Mavericks. The only bummer was that I had told TimeMachine not to back up one or two folders, and I was unable to pull them using the enclosure from iFixIt. The folders weren't critical, so I haven't lost sleep over anything, but I may need to deal with the old drive and it would be great if I could get it work in the enclosure.