Chosen Solution
I have the hard drive to my old Macbook pro 2011 and want to get a used macbook pro to put it in. Are there any new models (obviously still older model) that it can be placed in or do I have to stick with the 2011 editions?
Your HDD is a standard 2.5” SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) or SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) depending on when it was built and if its still the original drive that came in the system. The 2012 13” & 15” Unibody MacBook Pro’s are the last SATA based laptops Apple made. The retina MacBook Pro’s jumped to blade SSD’s and the newest Touch Bar systems even did away with the blade SSD drive and went to soldered on storage (not upgradable). The iMac’s have also gone through a few iterations as well! The 2012 21.5” is the first iMac which uses a 2.5” SATA drive and the 27” still used the 3.5” SATA drive (both SATA III). You could still use the 2.5” drive in the 27” models but you need an adapter frame. Just this month Apple dropped the HDD option in the newer 27” models (Fusion Drive config). So where does that leave us? You can’t really install the drive internally and as its SATA I/O is also slower than the faster blade SSD’s it really doesn’t offer much benefit either. But! Thats not to say the drive is useless! Getting a 2.5” SATA drive case is what I would do. Then you can transfer your data over to your new system which ever you get like this one 2.5” USB 3.0 SSD SATA Hard Drive Enclosure. As well as use it to extend your external storage for backup after reformatting.
