Any benefit of doing a fresh mavericks install?
Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/) can do that. Install CCC (free trial for 30 days) then; Get a cheap USB enclosure, install your new drive in the MacBook, install the old drive in the USB enclosure (other way around will work too). Boot up holding down the option key, select the old drive, initialize the new SSD using Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities folder) and then start up CCC. Select the Disk Center utility from the pull down "Window" menu and use that to clone your recovery partition to the new drive. Reboot - again hold down the Option key - select the new recovery partition, and use that to install the OS.
There are other ways to do this, but this should work as long as you have web access.
After reading the above post, I'm slightly confused.
I'm finally getting the Samsung EVO SSD next month and want to clean install Mavericks (fresh install for a fresh drive) and then reload all my data. Do I need to make a Mavericks USB drive first? What's the best way to do this?
I think the easiest way may be this - depending on when you bought your machine, Internet Recovery will load Mountain Lion or Mavericks:
http://www.macworld.com/article/2056561/how-to-make-a-bootable-mavericks-install-drive.html
Didn't even know I could do that. Seems quite simple. I assume from there I could just load my drive with CCC to finish the process?
I take it that you have a clone of your current system on an external hard drive (or do you plan on repurposing your internal drive as an external?) To complete the process, I'd just use Migration Assistant if I had an existing drive with everything on it - CCC might overwrite some files and put things where they don't belong on a new installation. It will also bring things over from a Time Machine backup.
I have an external I use for Time Machine backups. Is Migration Assistant where you pick and choose what transfers over?
I am planning to upgrade my Macbookpro http://support.apple.com/kb/sp621
to 480GB SSD from Crucial.
The question is, will my time machine backup be able to load on the new SSD when installed.
After reading the above post, I'm slightly confused.
I'm finally getting the Samsung EVO SSD next month and want to clean install Mavericks (fresh install for a fresh drive) and then reload all my data. Do I need to make a Mavericks USB drive first? What's the best way to do this?
As long as that Time Machine backup was made to a directly attached external drive with Lion 10.7.2 or later, then yes you can option key boot to the disk and restore directly from it to the SSD.
I have partitioned my Macbookpro HD, will it copy the same structure to the SSD?
I'm looking to finally upgrade my late 2011 MBP to an SSD. I was thinking of getting a Crucial M500 480GB drive, but having looked at some benchmarks it apparently isn't that good. So i've also started looking at the M550 512gb which is apparently much better but a lot more expensive.
My question is, is it worth paying more than another 30% for the better M550?
Is this a good SSD for all around performance? Also, how do I go about formatting the SSD for OSX and installing a fresh copy of Mavericks? I want to start with a clean copy of the OS and then transfer individual files over from the other drive. Also, could the firmware be updated on OSX, or would I have to bootcamp into Windows?
Also, will FileVault cause a significant performance loss from the SSD? I'm debating on whether or not to do a full drive encryption with this one.
Thanks for that. I'm in the UK and theres a bigger difference in price here, around $70 between the Samsung EVO and M500. I have read that the Samsung is faster but the Crucial has power loss protection. Am I really going to notice a great difference in speed in real world use for things like Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 and Aperture?
You notice a very very slight difference when opening a LARGE file in PS for example, but in day to day usage you can't really tell the difference among any of the newer drives.
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Thank you so much for your help. Just to be clear, do I need to do anything with the brand new SSD formatting wise to get it to work with OSX? Would I just format the new SSD as Mac OS Extended Journaled? I read the instructions you gave me concerning the bootable installer drive.
Also, FileVault prevents someone from taking the drive out of my computer and viewing its contents on another computer correct?
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