Is Mac OS X Mavericks bootable in a Samsung Pro 1TB SSD?

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Is Mac OS X Mavericks bootable in a Samsung Pro 1TB SSD?

I'm all set to purchase a brand new SSD (Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-7KE1T0BW)) for my Mac Book Pro 17" (late 2011) but am unsure if Mavericks 10.9.5 (and Yosemite 10.10.2, for that matter) will recognize such drive and boot from it.

My intention is that this will be the only "hard drive" on the system.

Can someone please confirm/deny that I can do this and boot up? Of course, I'll have Mac OS X (Mavericks for starters) installed on it from apple.com first.

Thanks!

Fernando

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), 17"

Posted on Mar 2, 2015 5:11 AM

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Answer 1

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BobHarris

Level 9

53,297 points

Mar 2, 2015 7:12 AM in response to Fernando N.

My MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2011) has a Samsung SSD 840 EVO 1TB installed as the boot disk. This is not exactly the same drive as you have, but my Macbook Pro boots and runs just find (Fantastic actually 😁 ).

I put the SSD in an external SATA docking station and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my existing Mavericks system to the SSD. CCC will also copy over the hidden recovery partition, which is extremely handy. Nothing worse than doing the swap and not having a recovery partition.

NOTE: I also have a bootable USB thumb drive with Mavericks on it, from when I downloaded the installer. SSD drives sometimes die in ways that would make the recovery partition inaccessible, so I'm not taking chances.

Then I used iFixIt.com instructions for opening my Macbook Pro and swapping out the existing drive and installing the SSD. Closed the Macbook Pro back up and it booted normally.

On Mavericks I can run TRIM Enabler. Without disabling some Mac OS X security features, it is my understanding that you cannot use TRIM Enabler on Yosemite. Performance even without TRIM enabled, will still beat a rotation hard disk hands down.

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Answer 2

babowa

Level 9

78,115 points

Mar 2, 2015 8:16 AM in response to Fernando N.

I second BobHarris' recommendations; I do not have a Samsung, but an OWC SSD which I installed in my MBP after formatting it and cloning my system to it while in an external enclosure. I then swapped hard drives following the videos on OWC's website and the new drive booted right up. FWIW, using that method, you wind up with an instantaneous bootable backup -if you put your old internal drive into the external enclosure.

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