Bit of advice required before purchase

[chrisrosemusic1]

I have an i7 MBP and am going to buy the new 2012 Air.

I'm selling my friend in need my MBP for £900 (not a bad trade off as I bought it with student discount for £1143 in January) and splashing for the £1249 Air with 8GB RAM upgrade (also will be at student price, so approx the same as my Pro).

However, (and this may be total rubbish) I wanted to keep the architecture of my current machine on the new SSD on the Air (currently sporting the stock 750GB) by just using a time machine restore upon first boot. Through a few YouTube videos etc I have heard that this is a bad idea. Apparently the SSD speed won't be as noticeable if you are using a HDD format - I can't personally understand why this would be true as I thought the reason for SSD was it's read/write speed, not it's filing system.

Please could you just clarify as the lack of superdrive on the Air means I can't install any of my music/photo software manually without spending the extra to buy the USB drive (which I don't use on my MBP).

Thanks

 

[jimboutilier]

I've used the migration assistant available on initial setup (or after) to set up several MBAs from a time machine backup and it works fine with excellent performance after the fact.

This doesn't "reformat" your SSD in any way and the file systems on the SSD and HD are the same (HFS+) in any case. The utube concept you describe sounds completely hokey.

As to an optical drive, OSX supports drive sharing with MACs and PCs so if you have any computer available with an optical drive you can likely share it's drive although on a PC it requires installing apples drive sharing drivers. Not all software installs can be done via drive sharing due to DRM restrictions.

Many external USB optical drives work with the MBA. I have a very slim Samsung that works great and was about half the cost of the apple external drive.

 

[KPOM]

However, (and this may be total rubbish) I wanted to keep the architecture of my current machine on the new SSD on the Air (currently sporting the stock 750GB) by just using a time machine restore upon first boot. Through a few YouTube videos etc I have heard that this is a bad idea. Apparently the SSD speed won't be as noticeable if you are using a HDD format - I can't personally understand why this would be true as I thought the reason for SSD was it's read/write speed, not it's filing system.

I have never heard of this. I've been using SSDs since the late-2008 MacBook Air, but I had an original MacBook Air with the 4200rpm hard drive before that. I've always used Migration Assistant, and never had an issue. What you might be reading is that by migrating, some of your old settings may carry over, and be less than ideal, but that won't have any impact on the SSD speed. You should notice a big boost in reboot speeds.

Which MBP do you have? Is it a dual core i7 (13") or quad core (15")? If it is the latter, note that the 2012 MacBook Airs still have dual core CPUs so you will notice a bit of a drop there.

Please could you just clarify as the lack of superdrive on the Air means I can't install any of my music/photo software manually without spending the extra to buy the USB drive (which I don't use on my MBP).

Thanks

If you use Migration Assistant, it will all carry over from your Time Machine backup. Alternatively, back up the content to a hard drive and plug it into your new MacBook Air. If you have Thunderbolt on your MacBook Pro, you can also put it into Target Disk Mode and connect it to your new MacBook Air directly. You can run Migration Assistant from there. It would be a LOT faster than migrating from a Time Capsule.

Anyway, you can "share" a CD/DVD drive with your old Mac or PC if absolutely necessary.

 

[chrisrosemusic1]

I have never heard of this. I've been using SSDs since the late-2008 MacBook Air, but I had an original MacBook Air with the 4200rpm hard drive before that. I've always used Migration Assistant, and never had an issue. What you might be reading is that by migrating, some of your old settings may carry over, and be less than ideal, but that won't have any impact on the SSD speed. You should notice a big boost in reboot speeds.

Which MBP do you have? Is it a dual core i7 (13") or quad core (15")? If it is the latter, note that the 2012 MacBook Airs still have dual core CPUs so you will notice a bit of a drop there.



If you use Migration Assistant, it will all carry over from your Time Machine backup. Alternatively, back up the content to a hard drive and plug it into your new MacBook Air. If you have Thunderbolt on your MacBook Pro, you can also put it into Target Disk Mode and connect it to your new MacBook Air directly. You can run Migration Assistant from there. It would be a LOT faster than migrating from a Time Capsule.

Anyway, you can "share" a CD/DVD drive with your old Mac or PC if absolutely necessary.

Thanks, that advice is awesome - I only have the i7 13" so it's dual core anyway and I'm thinking the i5 won't be much of a drop if it turbo boosts anyway Not much of a loss for the gain of the smaller, lighter form factor, better graphics and SSD.