Mid 2010 Macbook Pro

golfing bob said:

Also what is involved with cloning the SSD before installation and how complicated?

Click to expand...

1. Buy an external enclosure and put your old drive in it.
2. Install your new drive in your Mac.
3. Boot from your old (external) drive by holding the Option key on startup.
4. Prepare your new drive by formatting it to HFS+ using Disk Utility
5. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old (external) drive to the new (internal) drive.
6. Boot from the new internal drive.
7. Your now running on your new internal drive and your old drive is now an external drive, useful for backups or additional storage.

Some have encountered problems cloning from the internal to the external, then swapping them, which is why I recommend you swap them first, then clone from the external to the new internal. For more info on this: Can't Boot From Cloned External SSD

golfing bob said:

2) I have read that since I have Yosemite I can now upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 16 GB- is that worth it or just go with an 8 GB upgrade.

Click to expand...

It depends on your normal use. If you're not regularly maxing out the 4GB of RAM that you have, adding RAM won't produce any improvement in performance. This should help: How much RAM do I need in my Mac?

Do you have a 13-inch MacBook Pro (Mid 2010), or a 15- or 17-inch model? Only the 13-inch model supports 16 GB of RAM, the other two models support a maximum of 8 GB. Just something to keep in mind as you wouldn't want to purchase and install the wrong amount of memory.

I just upgraded a late 2009 Macbook pro, the SSD drive made a big difference. The computer had previously been maxed out on RAM. I went with an OWC SSD drive, because it is not suppose to need trim to keep top performance, although people are still debating if trim helps or not.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC
http://blog.macsales.com/27116-disable-trim-before-upgrading-to-yosemite


Another option for SSD drives I was considering is the new Angelbird for mac drives, as they fake the id of an apple SSD drive, which allows for trim to work just like a native apple SSD drive.

https://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/31/angelbird-ssd-trim/

I would also max out the ram if you can, although it may not help as much as a SSD drive. I tend to give my old computers to family when I upgrade, so I always like to give them stuff fully loaded so they don't have to consider it later.

----------

Oh, and I have heard sometimes with Lion or later you want to ensure that the hard drive clones both the main drive, and the recovery partition. You will want to google it to ensure that you have both on your cloned drive.

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/cloning-apples-recovery-hd-partition