2010 Macbook Pro SSD Upgrade Questions

[nyudds]

Okay so lately my macbook pro has been kind of sluggish. I did some research and most people on this forum tend to agree that upgrading from HDD to SSD would give me the most noticeable speed difference. I just wanted to confirm that I am understanding everything correctly before proceeding.

First, I would be purchasing this to replace my HDD:

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX100...qid=1424644180&sr=8-1&keywords=crucial+mx+100

Once receiving I would have to first clone my HDD using SuperDuper before swapping out the HDD for the new SSD. Can I clone it to my external hard drive, just pop in the new SSD, and then clone back to the SSD?

I found the following post which provides instructions on how to do this:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/12483448/

For Step 4 would I use the GUID or APPLE partition?

Last question, I noticed some people saying that it is also necessary to make a copy of the OS (I'm on snow leopard) on the bootable drive. Would cloning the HDD not automatically do this?

Sorry if these are idiotic questions but as you could probably tell, I'm not the most experienced person when it comes to this stuff. Please let me know if I am missing anything.

 

[Mik3F]

Thats a good choice of disk.

If you have a USB caddy you can put the SSD into that and clone the original straight onto it

However if you don't then yes the way you mentioned will work

Have you considered doing a fresh install onto the SSD rather than cloning?

 

[ron1004]

Your 2010 is SATA II so you will not see the full speed potential of the SSD, but will most certainly be faster than the stock HDD.
The 2011 and later have SATA III and they can use the full speed of the SSD.

I just used Time Machine and did a restore to the new SSD drive which ran overnight, and it booted up looking exactly the same as the old HDD, but with loads more speed.

 

[jsagurton]

DEFINITELY can vouch for the MX100. I put one in my 17" 2010 MBP and it was like a new machine. I wish I'd done it much sooner. My 2010 runs Yosemite like a champ now.

One thing to note about the MX100, I ran into a few issues with my cloning. It failed a few times, and I was all worried, but Crucial basically advised me to unplug the drive from the power and data for about a half hour then try again, and that fixed everything. Smooth sailing ever since.

 

[nyudds]

Thats a good choice of disk.

If you have a USB caddy you can put the SSD into that and clone the original straight onto it

However if you don't then yes the way you mentioned will work

Have you considered doing a fresh install onto the SSD rather than cloning?

What exactly would be the steps if I elected to do a fresh install? How could I retain certain apps such a Microsoft Office and I few others that I paid for?

 

[Bbafett]

What exactly would be the steps if I elected to do a fresh install? How could I retain certain apps such a Microsoft Office and I few others that I paid for?

Even with a fresh install you can use migration assistant to move your applications over from the old hdd to the new ssd. It doesn't take too long for it to move everything over. I didn't have an issue with my programs and rights to them. However I didn't see an option to pick which programs I wanted so it was all or nothing on the applications.