Standard Phillips screws secure the 500 GB Toshiba hard drive, meaning upgrading to a larger drive will be easy after you decide to start shooting RAW.

2.5" profile and a spinning platter? This hard drive is old news still perfectly good for most users' needs.

We were curious about Apple's choice to use a proprietary SSD in the MacBook Pro with Retina display rather than the standard 2.5" SATA drive. Disregarding the speed difference—after all, SSDs have been around for a while—the choice of the proprietary SSD is motivated by size.

The 2.5" SATA drive in this MacBook Pro is almost three times as thick as the proprietary SSD in the MacBook Pro with Retina display: 9.45 mm compared to 3.16 mm, respectively.

The drive has 4 mounting posts/screws that can be removed using a T6 torx bit.