Do I need enclosure to clone SSD in optical bay?

[maldoror]

i'm replacing my optical drive with an SSD and want to clone it and use it as the boot up drive. can i do this after i install it? or do i have to have an external enclosure for the cloning?

 

[Freyqq]

You would need to use cloning software that works while booted up on the active drive. If you did a time machine backup to a third drive, you could do this with 2 ssd installed.

 

[maldoror]

so essentially do a time machine backup of my present boot drive to my external backup drive. install SSD in optical bay. format it. do i need to install OS X on it? then load time machine backup and target SSD for bootup.

 

[Freyqq]

The easiest way to do a cloning would be like this:

1. Main bay in laptop has a HDD/SSD. Install your other drive into the optical bay spot. Have a third drive as an external with the time machine backup on it already.
2. Hold alt during bootup and select the restore partition
3. restore time machine backup from external drive to the drive you want as the boot drive
4. reboot
5. select the new drive as the default boot drive in system preferences
6. clear off the hard drive, now that the SSD is the new boot drive