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Best/easiest way to transfer everything from current HDD to SSD

H

hewhohoggs

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 18, 2012
60
21
Hello all,
So I am relatively confused on how to do this. I'm currently running Mountain Lion on my mid 2012 13" MBP with a 5400 rpm HDD. I am purchasing a crucial m4 tonight and I want to move everything from my current HD to the SSD. Can someone point me to an instruction guide on how to properly and safely do this? Will I need to buy a SATA to usb in order to do it?
 
Here's a simple approach:
  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. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old (external) drive to the new (internal) drive.
  5. Boot from the new internal drive.
  6. Your now running on your new internal drive and your old drive is now an external drive, useful for backups or additional storage.
 
GGJstudios said:
Here's a simple approach:
  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. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old (external) drive to the new (internal) drive.
  5. Boot from the new internal drive.
  6. Your now running on your new internal drive and your old drive is now an external drive, useful for backups or additional storage.
Click to expand...

You are amazing. Thank you!

Edit- by "external enclosure", do you mean a SATA to USB? Would that work? What do you recommend?
 
hewhohoggs said:
You are amazing. Thank you!

Edit- by "external enclosure", do you mean a SATA to USB? Would that work? What do you recommend?
Click to expand...

Yes, an external enclosure for 2.5" S-ATA HDDs will do fine. Ones with USB 2.0 connection will cost 10 USD and more. Ones with USB 3.0 interface will cost a bit more. Newegg and MacSales and many other vendors have such enclosure.
 
Some SSD's come with a USB data transfer cable, in that case use CCC and clone everything onto the SSD. Then remove the HDD and install the SSD and theoretically everything should already be there.
 
What if your new SSD is about half as large as your existing HHD? I'm installing a 256GB SSD and replacing a 512GB HHD. I plan on using a bootable USB drive with installable Mountain Lion to do a fresh install on the new SSD.

I will use the original HHD in the optical drive bay. I guess I'll have to backup all the stuff in my "Home folder" to a external drive and then reformat the old HHD to get it setup as just a data drive. Then I can copy my backed up "Home folder" to the newly formatted HHD.

After that, I can move the location of my "Home folder" to the HHD using the instructions here: http://martinbay.net/how-to-move-user-folder/.

This all going to work?
 
@guardsix

I had a similar situation. I could not buy a 250GB SSD because they were out of stock and I could not wait - I bought a 120GB instead.

My OS and apps occupied about 40GB of space on my HD. I partitioned my HDD and moved all my data, music, photos and even user folder to the partition - altogether this occupied about 60GB (I think).

Then, using Carbon Copy I cloned the partition with the OS/Apps to my SSD. I then cloned my other parition to a new HDD drive.

To be sure things were working well, I installed the SSD and then rebooted. After the successful boot I installed the new HDD drive and all went perfectly. Note, I did name the new HDD drive the same as the partition the data came from.

I was surprised it worked so well...Carbon Copy is totally worth purchasing.
 
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