How to change my HDD to an SSD for my MacBook Pro ?

How large is your old drive and how large is your SSD? If they're close to the same size, you can simply put on or the other in an enclosure and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your old drive to the SSD. If the SSD is smaller than your old drive, it would be best to use Time Machine on an external drive and 'selectively' move whatever you need to your SSD.

Good luck,

Clinton

Same question as Clinton:

What size SSD? and how many GB used on your actual disk?

If the usage on the actual disk is more than 50GB lower than the SSD it is easy:

connect the SSD to USB with a sata-to-usb adapter or an enclosure with usb connector, then format the SSD (Mac OS extended (journalled)), start an application called CarbonCopyCloner, and clone your internal disk to the SSD, CCC will ask you to make a Recovery partition, do so, then clone. Then restart while holding the Alt(=option) key and choose the SSD as start disk. If all works well, shutdown and switch the disks.

When starting up with the SSD inside, start DiskUtility and "repair permissions". Ready.

It is depending n the things you do with the computer, heavy gaming, large processing like FinalCutPro, other video processing, large Libraries, etcetera, it would help to make things faster. But those applications would certainly profit from much more Ram (the max for your computer is 16GB).

So for more Ram, buy absolutely the correct spec, Mac is very sensitive, buy a good Brand, like Crucial, buy in a good store like OWC.

For an SSD, nowadays not too expensive anymore, buy from OWC, or from Crucial, only, the speed 500/400 or 495/450 is not important but compatibility is, for example the new 22nm Samsung SSD 840 is a super SSD, but its controller is not really at ease in a Mac.

Size 480-500GB makes it all a simple operation, as stated above, use the existing HDD as an external backup disk by putting it in a good enclosure with USB3.

BTW you van have a better answer perhaps from Clinton or me, when we know a bit more: an easy way is downloading Etrecheck from www.etresoft.com run it and copy the list ("via the clipboard) here.

"so much information..."

Yes, but surprising. I have some questions and try to make it multiple choice.

- Do you use/need Virtualbox continuously? Yes/Seldom/Not at all.

- What VM do you have? Window/Linux/OSX

- Do you use/need the Cloud Hub? Yes/No

- Do you use/need MS Office? Yes/No

- Which Adobe Apps do you use/need?

- Do you use this MBP as a server?

The answers are important to be able to give good advise.

- We leave Virtualbox alone then..

- MSO, OK got it, we leave it alone then. One remark: make backups of your "Identity" file: when they are too large, they will cause an irreparable crash.

- Only Adobe Reader, why not use Preview only, and uninstall everything Adobe (leave the latest Flash Player plugins)? When you keep AdobeReader: you do not really need the Safari plugins, in earlier days they caused problems. And I suppose you also do not need the AdobeResourceSynchroniser.

BUT now to your question, the SSD.

Since you have about 250GB on your startup disk, you need either a 500GB SSD, or you should lay off some large databases (like music or movies), to an external. Since pricing has gone down fast, I propose the 500GB one.

a. Do use a SSD with the Marvell controller, A very good choice (well tested) would be the Crucial M500, do not use an SSD with the Sandforce controller or the like (for example the Samsung 840). The prices are about the same for 500GB size for all brands, much cheaper per byte is the Crucial M500 960GB, which I am going to test next month.

b. to install: put the SSD in an external housing (10-20$) with USB, download CarbonCopyCloner to your mac, connect the SSD, with DiskUtility format the SSD to Mac OS extended (journalled) with option set to Guid partition table, the run CarbonCopyCloner and choose the recovery partition partition maker when asked, then clone your disk to the SSD. When done completely, shutdown the Mac. Start up again while holding the Alt(=option) key, choose the SSD to start from, and seee that all works correctly. Then shutdown again, open the mac and switch the disks (careful with the connectors ⚠).

c. you can put the HDD in the external housing, to use as backup disk.

Ready.

Lex

Yes, that happens sometimes. No problem though... 😎

Glad you were successful. Have fun with your selfmade speedmonster....🙂

Lex

Hey Lex, what about Trim. Do we need to enable it?

I've just got my Crucial m500 for 480G, and plan to install it on mid 2012 macbook pro. And to be honest I'm a little bit puzzeled with all the advices, some think it is good to clone HDD, another think that it's better to make "fresh" instalation. I use my laptop for development and don't want to reinstall all the development tools, so I probably gonna go with clone, do you think it's gonna be fine, or maybe it's better to reinstall the whole system when I get more time? And yes, I have now 500 gb HDD, used about a half (70% by the apeture library).

Will really appreciate your help, especially about the TRIM!🙂

BR,

Serhiy.

You have the Crucial ssd, one of the best, read above what is said about Marvell and Sandforce controllers.

1. Personally I normally use the "clone" method, because it is so much quicker than other methods.

2. You must be sure of two things first: there are no crippling softwares on your computer, and your OS is fully updated, that is 10.8.5 or 10.7.5. I would not upgrade to Mavericks, if you did not already do that: after upgrades you sometimes have issues, or encounter incompatibilities in your softwares.

So if you ask advice here, you may already run an Etrecheck list on the MBP where the SSD has to go in, and post it to help us check for inconsistencies.

3. About Trim: this command is in OSX, but only activated for Apple built-in SSD's. In "earlier" days (Leopard, SnowLeopard) the OS was a bit less sophisticated and "crude" and it was relatively safe to activate the Trim command. But even in those days it could lead to serious OS issues, because for the Trim command you have to change a file deep in the belly of OSX. The so called trim enablers could do it for you, but they were sloppy programmed in general and had to be updated every time there was an OS update or upgrade. The Terminal commands method was/is even more "dangerous". Mountain Lion and Mavericks are much more "efficient" and "finetuned", and the modern Marvell controllers are much better and efficient at preparing the disk for new writes.

So in my opinion it does not bring much anymore to install Trim and the risks are higher than lower. I advise against it especially when you have the modern OSX and a new SSD with Marvell controller.

This is not just theory, but everything I say here I test regularly.

------ So, post an Etrecheck list here, before you put the SSD in, and we will react.

Lex

Hey Lex!

Many thanks for you quick response. Actually yesterday I've formated my SSD as you adviced above, then copied everything from my HDD using CCC. It seems that I can start my Mac from that drive, but it's not yet installed, so you feedback it more than appreciated. Please see Entrecheck list below. Let me know if I have to change something or run the process again.

Thanks a lot!

Hardware Information:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)

MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro9,2

1 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU: 2 cores

16 GB RAM

Video Information:

Intel HD Graphics 4000 - VRAM: 1024 MB

Audio Plug-ins:

BluetoothAudioPlugIn: Version: 1.0

AirPlay: Version: 1.9

AppleAVBAudio: Version: 2.0.0

iSightAudio: Version: 7.7.3

System Software:

OS X 10.9 (13A603) - Uptime: 0 days 0:3:34

Disk Information:

APPLE HDD HTS547550A9E384 disk0 : (500.11 GB)

EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

Macintosh HD (disk0s2) /: 499.25 GB (253.33 GB free)

Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted>: 650 MB

MATSHITADVD-R
UJ-8A8

USB Information:

Apple Inc. FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)

Apple Inc. BRCM20702 Hub

Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller

Apple Computer, Inc. IR Receiver

Apple Inc. Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad

FireWire Information:

Thunderbolt Information:

Apple Inc. thunderbolt_bus

Kernel Extensions:

Problem System Launch Daemons:

Problem System Launch Agents:

Launch Daemons:

[loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist

[loaded] com.bombich.ccc.plist

[loaded] com.google.keystone.daemon.plist

[loaded] org.macosforge.xquartz.privileged_startx.plist

Launch Agents:

[loaded] com.amazon.sendtokindle.launcher.plist

[loaded] com.google.keystone.agent.plist

[loaded] org.macosforge.xquartz.startx.plist

User Launch Agents:

[failed] com.google.GoogleContactSyncAgent.plist

User Login Items:

iTunesHelper

Caffeine

Alfred

CleanMyDrive

Dropbox

3rd Party Preference Panes:

Flash Player

Java

Perian

Internet Plug-ins:

Default Browser.plugin

Flash Player.plugin

FlashPlayer-10.6.plugin

googletalkbrowserplugin.plugin

JavaAppletPlugin.plugin

npgtpo3dautoplugin.plugin

o1dbrowserplugin.plugin

QuickTime Plugin.plugin

User Internet Plug-ins:

CitrixOnlineWebDeploymentPlugin.plugin

Bad Fonts:

None

Time Machine:

Time Machine not configured!

Top Processes by CPU:

4% firefox

4% identityservicesd

3% WindowServer

1% mds_stores

1% EtreCheck

1% fontd

1% ocspd

1% backupd

1% mds

0% Dock

Top Processes by Memory:

279 MB
firefox

147 MB
mds_stores

131 MB
com.apple.IconServicesAgent

66 MB Dropbox

59 MB com.apple.WebKit.WebContent

33 MB Finder

33 MB App Store

33 MB soagent

33 MB WindowServer

33 MB mds

Virtual Memory Statistics:

13.07 GB Free RAM

1.63 GB
Active RAM

350 MB
Inactive RAM

984 MB
Wired RAM

320 MB
Page-ins

0 B Page-outs

In your actual startup disk now:

1. In SystemPreferences/Users&Groups/LoginItems remove (with the minus sign underneath) Alfred, Caffeine, and CleanMyDrive. After that they should be Quit (from their menu), and then uninstalled. They should not be installed, and certainly not in Mavericks.

2. Do you really need Xquartz? I do not think so, but at least remove the entries from Library/LaunchAgents and the Library/LaunchDaemons folders. You can use them manually when needed and Quit when finished.

3. Remove the googletalkbrowserplugin.plugin and the o1dbrowserplugin.plugin and the npgtpo3dautoplugin.plugin from the InternetPlugins folder.

Now restart.

With CCC make a new clone to the external disk, then switch the SSD inside, and with DiskUtility, "repair permissions" on both disks.

Done, have fun.

Lex