I need a larger capacity Hard drive for my Mac book pro, what do I do?

Question

I am running out of space on my hard drive, what do I do?

Answer 1

Well in short, there are two ways to solve this:
A) clean up your harddisk
B) buy a bigger harddisk and replace the internal with it
Details:
A) clean up your harddisk:
Empty trash can, delete unused apps (with a tool like AppDelete), Get rid of old data (by using a tool like WhatSize to identify the biggest space suckers) and/or delete unused videos, photos and music...
B) buy a bigger harddisk and replace the internal with it:
First put your new HD in an external enclosure and plug it into your MBP either over USB or Firewire. If not already formated for a Mac: use diskutility to format and partition it with GUID boot and a single or more partitions (volumes) just as you have it on your orginial HD just bigger in size... ;-)
Then you will need a tool like SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to clone your existing harddisk onto the new one (all volumes if you had more than one).
Once done try to boot from your new external HD by selecting the startvolume in system settings or by holding the "alt" (option) key while powering up, then select the external HD to boot and try it out.
If all works, power of all and open your MBP and swap the hardisks. See http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody-Mid-2010-Hard-Drive-Repl acement/3030/1 on how to do it (that link is actually for a 15" MBP from mid 2010).
Boot normally an check if all is well
Place the original HD in the external enclosure and use it as an externel HD extension or as a partial backup disk (as it is smaller compared to your new HD)
I hope I was clear enough on all steps, if not feel free to ask again.
Regards from Switzerland