Cloning hard drive MacBook Pro early 2011

Depending on the health & speed of the hard drive it may take an hour or two. It is hard to say as I've cloned so many different systems and most times I just walk away to work on other things. It has been a while since I cloned a system this old (SATA II controller and USB2 ports).

I find Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is a great app for cloning a macOS boot drive as it will also recreate the hidden recovery partition. Just make sure to use Disk Utility to properly erase your new SSD first. Erase physical SSD as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). You could use the brand new APFS file system instead, but I find it gets corrupted way too often, but the choice is yours.

FYI, you can use CCC to clone the drive you are booted from, but try not to do any other work on the computer while you are cloning it.

I've used CCC for years and it works very well. Did you get the kit that includes a USB external enclosure? Things will go much easier if you temporarily put the new SSD into the external enclosure, plug it into your Mac. Then launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) and erase and format the new SSD. That will make it bootable. Then launch CCC and clone your entire system (probably about an hour). When finished, test it to make sure it will boot from it. If it works, boot back into the internal, disconnect the new SSD, unplug, take SSD out of the enclosure, and proceed with the uninstall/install. There are great how to videos on the OWC website under support. Once you have the new SSD installed, you could actually put the old hard drive into that enclosure for an instant backup. And you are done - boot up and enjoy.