OWC SSD Upgrade and Lion?

Why couldn't you use a product such as SuperDuper and an external drive?

NutsNGum said:

I'm considering an upgrade to one of the higher capacity Aura Pro Blade SSDs from OWC, but I've got a question:

Since their SSD will be missing the Lion recovery partition, how is it possible to install Lion onto it to begin with? Especially now as there is currently no hardware restore solution.

Has anyone tried it yet?

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Something I haven't thought about... I was thinking about maybe someday picking one of those up.

I'm not sure this works, but isn't it possible to make a usb-stick installer?

I have a Mercury SSD from OWC running Lion, and it also has the recovery partition. You can always back up to Time Machine or cloning as well as with Disk Utility.

NutsNGum said:

Are you referring to the Mercury Aura Pro Blade SSD, or the 2.5" variety?

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The 2.5".

NutsNGum said:

Because I don't want to be constantly carrying around an external drive?

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What are you talking about?

1. Use SuperDuper and back up the current SSD to the external drive
2. Install the OWC SSD
3. Boot off the external drive.
4. Copy external drive to OWC SSD
5. Done

NutsNGum said:

Fair enough, I was curious as to whether or not the recovery partition would transfer to another drive correctly. I assume it would?

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No, the current version of SuperDuper does not.

I just recently installed the Aura Express Pro, but installed a clean copy of Snow Leopard. It runs extremely well, if not better than my original SSD. It's not that easy to tell the difference, but everything seems snappier. Please let us know how Lion behaves with this drive because I am interested in upgrading but a little worried about getting a lot of beach balls and incompatibility.

NutsNGum said:

Fair enough, I was curious as to whether or not the recovery partition would transfer to another drive correctly. I assume it would?

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On the 2011, you can still do an internet restore. It will take longer, but it works in the case of a nuked/empty drive. And it will install the restore partition onto the new drive.

Here's a simple solution:

1. Attach a USB drive (a regular drive - 2.5" or 3.5" external hard drive)
2. Boot the MBA holding the 'Option' key
3. Select boot from Recovery
4. Run recovery, and during the process you can select to load Lion on the external drive (try it, cool, it works and leaves the internal drive intact
5. Now swap out your internal SSD drive
6. Boot while holding the 'Option' key
7. This time select Recovery option on the USB drive
8. Now select to load Lion on the new internal drive
9. It will load Lion and recovery partition on the new internal drive, fresh install, just like from the factory.
10. done…..

Or try this.