(Note: while some portions of this user tip can be used when installing a new hard drive in your MacBook Pro, it is intended only for those upgrading to a SSD.) There are, with most MacBook Pros (exclusive of the Retina display models) only two modifications that you can make without voiding your Apple warranty or AppleCare extended warranty – upgrading the RAM and upgrading the drive in the hard drive bay. If you’ve already upgraded your RAM and simply want more speed, you may want to consider upgrading your old hard drive with a SSD (Solid State Drive). Many people come to the MacBook Pro forum asking about SSD upgrades, so this user tip is applicable to those, primarily, who have already made the decision to upgrade. Note that I only recommend using a SSD in 2009 and later MacBook Pros with a 3.0Gbps to 6.0Gbps interface speed – and I recommend buying a 6.0Gbps SSD regardless of the fact that models with a SATA II interface won’t be able to use the full-negotiated speed of 6.0Gbps. Because you may want to upgrade your Mac sometime in the future although you'd likely be upgrading to a Retina model these days. But you may still want to use the SSD in an enclosure or in another machine. Before you buy Before you purchase a SSD, there are a few questions that you need to ask: What capacity do you need?
![Clone Hard Drive To Ssd Mac Clone Hard Drive To Ssd Mac](/uploads/1/2/4/2/124210255/361316797.jpg)
It’s just my opinion, but the bigger the better. Now you may want to install a 120-128GB SSD and simply use it as a boot device and as a place to store your most frequently used applications. This is certainly the least expensive approach. But most people will want to store much more than that on an internal drive save, perhaps, for large iTunes libraries and large photo/movie libraries. There are numerous advantages to a larger drive, however. If you do photo or video editing, the SSD makes a super-fast scratch/working drive for individual projects. You can always store your hefty data on an external drive, of course, but for working projects I recommend using your fast internal SSD.
Using Disk Utility To Clone The Mac Hard Drive. Once in “Disk Utility”, select the OS partition from the left hand pane, which is usually the first partition under the first Hard Drive in the list. Then, click the “Restore” tab on the right hand pane. Here you should see your OS partition already selected in the “Source” box. With OS X El Capitan and later versions of the Mac OS, Apple changed the process for using Disk Utility to clone a Mac’s drive.While it's still possible to create an exact copy (a clone) of any drive connected directly to your Mac, the changes made to Disk Utility means there are extra steps involved if you wish to use Disk Utility’s Restore function to clone your startup drive.
Currently, SSDs come in basically three usable sizes: 120-128GB, 240-256GB and 480-512GB. But Crucial is now shipping a 960GB M500 drive that sells for under $600. So decide, first, how much storage you can actually utilize before making any buying decisions. And Samsung now has a 1 Terabyte EVO drive - priced at about $800+ but which can be found for under $650.
Decisions, decisions! See for an excellent review of the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB drive. Crucial also has two high-capacity SSDs - the older 960GB M500 and the recently released 1 Terabyte M550, which sports faster speeds than the M500 series but is still available at a reasonable price. I would recommend any of these three drives, now, for those wanting the higher capacity.
See a review of the M550 series. Which drive should I buy? Unfortunately, there are no Consumer Reports articles out for SSDs on MacBook Pros.
There is, however, a very good “information and buyers guide” website -. It’s chock-full of information about how SSDs work, what technology individual manufacturers employ, and includes not only a ‘buyer’s guide’ but an almost endless thread containing users experiences. Beware, though, as it is primarily geared towards Windows users. Still, that shouldn’t stop you from reading much of the information there. One thing that I always look for in an SSD, too, is the “Mac-friendliness” of the drive – e.g., can the firmware be upgraded using a Mac or must it be upgraded on a Windows machine? Unfortunately, the majority of SSDs fall in the latter category.
That, alone, may not be a showstopper for you in determining which brand of SSD to purchase, but it should at least give you pause. Getting everything in place Before you begin your MacBook Pro surgery, here is a checklist of things you should have on hand:. SSD of choice.
Enclosure for external drive (can be found at Amazon or OWC, prices range from $8-20, usually, for a USB 2.0 kit will all cables). Toolkit that includes a Phillips #00 screwdriver, a Torx T6 screwdriver, and, possibly, a spudger – I recommend this kit -from OWC. (we’ll get into how to use this in a moment) Start the process There are two ways to go about getting the data from your old drive to your SSD. The first is to install the SSD into your enclosure and make your clone before installing the SSD. The second is simply to install the SSD into your hard drive bay and your old hard drive into your enclosure and boot from the enclosure.
No one way is better than the other. We’ll examine both ways here: Install the SSD into your USB enclosure and plug it up. Use Disk Utility (ApplicationsUtilities folder) to format the SSD, erasing it and formatting as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” with a single GUID partition.
Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your hard drive to the SSD. If you are running Lion or Mountain Lion, choose the option to copy the Recovery Partition to the SSD. After the clone is complete, restart your computer whilst holding down the option key and select the SSD as the boot drive. You’ll know in a few seconds if your clone was successful. Alternately, you can just go ahead and install your SSD into your MacBook Pro (endless number of DIY videos online – see OWC’s Installation Videos - ) and put your hard drive into the USB enclosure and boot from it.
Then just boot from the enclosed drive and use Disk Utility to format the SSD and clone the contents of your hard drive onto your SSD as noted above. Either method should work just fine. Be sure to visit the OWC video installation page, or the numerous videos on YouTube, about installing the drive into your MacBook Pro. You’re almost finished Now that you have your cloned SSD in your hard drive bay, you should be able to hold down the option key and boot from the SSD.
The first thing you’ll want to do is to go to System PreferencesStartup Disk and select your new SSD as your startup drive. I would also recommend using to enable TRIM on your new SSD. Not sure what TRIM does? See this Wikipedia article -. Note that with every.1 upgrade to OS X you will have to enable TRIM once again. I just make it a habit when I update my system.
Some may ask of TRIM is necessary these days since most SSDs use proprietary garbage collection. I can only say that I still enable TRIM just in case. And Apple's SSDs utilize TRIM as well. Up and running You should be up and running now, enjoying the many benefits of a SSD – particularly speed.
You shouldn’t have any problems if you’ve followed these instructions. The only problem that some people have run into, in my experience, has been with a faulty SATA cable (affecting 2009 models more than any other).
If you’re having problems such a ‘beachballing,’ slow speeds, etc., look at replacing your SATA cable first – it’s the most likely culprit. You’ll also want to make certain that you stay up to date with SSD firmware updates – these cannot only eliminate ‘bugs’ in the firmware, but may also make your SSD operate more efficiently. Retina model? The newest MacBook Pros, of course - the Retina models - already come with a SSD installed. Until recently, though, you really couldn't upgrade your flash storage. Now, on certain models, you can upgrade the flash storage (although you'll void your warranty if you crack the case, so buyer beware). Both and produce flash storage modules so that you can upgrade your storage to up to 1 terabyte.
Note that both the OWC and the Transcend modules will only work with 'older' Retina models or MacBook Pro Airs - not the newer models that have a PCIe interface. Still, having these options available is more than you could have hoped for previously. Will there ever be PCIe based flash storage available? Only time will tell. Not much else to say about Retina models. Final note I do not recommend placing your SSD into the optical bay of your MacBook Pro – your start-up drive is meant to be in the hard drive bay and that’s where you want to install your SSD.
Installing another SSD or a hard drive into your optical bay is beyond the scope of this user tip. And also note that this tip covers only one method – my preferred method – for getting your data to your SSD. Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums. Apple disclaims any and all liability for the acts, omissions and conduct of any third parties in connection with or related to your use of the site.
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Click to expand.Disk Util will work just fine and is actually the official Apple method for cloning a drive. The process on that page has some steps that make no sense to me though. They are not actually cloning the disk, they are just formatting it then using recovery to reinstall the OS, then afterwards using Migration Assistant to pull data off the old drive. Also, that business about selected GUID as the boot format is not necessary as that is selected by default.
Here is an easier way. Just pop in your new SSD and put the old one in a USB enclosure then option key boot to it. Then follow the steps in to format the disk with Disk Util then clone the old disk to the new. When that is done shutdown and unplug the USB enclosure and boot up to the new SSD.
Then go to System Prefs and in the Startup Disk pane set the new SSD as the boot disk. CCC is no better at this at all. I do think perhaps CCC is easier to understand for the novice. You just open the app and it is fairly obvious how to clone from one drive to another. DU works just as well though. Click to expand.Disk Util won't clone the Windows partition.
You will need to use something like WinClone to do that. The new drive does not need to be the same size. There is a limitation with the way Disk Util clones the OS X volume though.
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The destination volume needs to be the same size to larger than the source, even if the source is not full. So for example, if you want to Disk Util clone a 500GB OS X volume with 200GB or data to a 256GB disk.
You would need to use Disk Util to first shrink down the 500GB volume to under 256GB, then do the clone. Click to expand.You are a lot more knowledgeable than I am so I have to ask. Is cloning and restoring the same thing or different? The reason I ask is when I installed a 256GB SSD in my Mac I did the following. From one of my other posts - When I added an SSD to my MacPro I renamed my original drive to Old Mac HD, installed my SSD, booted to the original drive, and then used the Disk Utility 'Restore' function to copy everything from the old drive to the SSD. It was like making an image of the old drive on the new one and hardly took any time at all to copy all the data over. I was not sure it would work since the drives were not the same size but when I re-booted to the SSD it was just as if I had booted to the original drive.but faster.
Everything (OS, app's, setting, even all my email) was exactly the same. So I set the SSD as the boot drive and never looked back. end post - I honestly can't remember if it copied over the recovery partition but I know I currently have one on the SSD at this time. But I may have done a clean install since that time which would explain it. Since the original drive was larger (1TB) than the SSD I'm guessing the answer to my question is there is a difference between cloning and restoring using 'disk utility'.
But since it worked is there a reason to use one over the other? Looking forward to your response, Jon. Thanks for the reply! I had a feeling the terms were interchangeable but when you mentioned in your post about not being able to do it with Disk Utility when the source was larger than the destination, that's what made me think clone and restore were different since I had done the restore from a 1TB - 256GB drive.
I'm currently running Mountain Lion but may have been on Lion at the time I installed the SSD. Has Disk Utility changed in newer OS's? Or did I totally misunderstand what you meant? Thanks for the terminal command to check the drive. Click to expand.Yup, the 1TB was one large/source volume.
At least I don't think I had partitioned it.humm. Pretty strange because what you said about not being able to clone a large volume to a smaller one makes perfect sense. I thought about this all day (read your reply before leaving for work) and I can't remember the steps I took to do it other than using restore in DU. It was really just a 'I wonder if this will work' kind of thing because I was a new Mac user at the time and was surprised it worked. If it helps, looking at my purchase history I upgraded to Lion back in 2011 so I might have even been running Snow Leopard at the time because I installed the SSD not long after getting the Mac Pro.
I wish I could be of more help. Maybe when I upgrade to Mavericks or Yosemite I'll see if I can duplicate it at that time.