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Help setting up a SSD

M

mc77

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 7, 2009
26
0
Hello everyone,
I’m hoping I can get some help/suggestions for using an SSD to create a boot drive for my system and applications in my 09’ Mac Pro. I know there are a number of posts already on this topic, and I searched through many of them and tried what has been suggested, but despite this I can’t seem to get things working!
My current setup in the Mac Pro: I have three of the hard drive bays in a RAID 0 and the fourth bay used for Time machine backups. I also have an external drive used just for my iTunes library. I have installed the SSD in the empty optical bay and have tried the following: I did a fresh install of snow leopard on the SSD and then tried to migrate my username, applications, settings over from my RAID. The weird thing was I was not able to bring the above over as my applications folder was listed at 145GB:eek: And of course it is only about 8GB. I’m not sure why it is showing up as so much? I then tried to just copy and paste my applications folder from my RAID, which did work, but most of the applications did not work properly.
I’ve read about people just cloning their drive over to the SSD, But my SSD is only 128GB so carbon copy cloner won’t let me clone my raid as it is too large.

Sorry about the long post on a topic that is covered many times but any help would be much appreciated! When I did boot off the SSD and launched Safari the speed was incredible so I would love to be able to get this working properly.
 
Sorry to say this, but I think the best solution to your problem is to install OS X and your applications from scratch. I can't tell you why your apps folder has grown to such a massive size, but it is in your best interest to fix that. It will make backup easier and more efficient. It might be worth saving that partition somewhere so you can browse the files and try to find out what happened.

If you save and migrate your /<username>/Library folder most of your settings/configuration for the apps will be preserved.
 
I haven't tried Migration Assistant as I read that some people had problems using it for this purpose, but perhaps I should be giving this a try. Are you also using a ssd in your setup? If so, did you use Migration assistant?
 
Hello cutterman,
thanks for your reply - I'm hoping I might be able to find some other solution rather than installing all the apps again. If nothing else works, I imagine I'll have to go that route. Thanks for your input
 
mc77 said:
I haven't tried Migration Assistant as I read that some people had problems using it for this purpose, but perhaps I should be giving this a try. Are you also using a ssd in your setup? If so, did you use Migration assistant?
Click to expand...

I haven't used it for this specific purpose but I've used it for other things. It's good if you want to transfer everything. Is your app folder really 145GB? If it is, then MA is no go for apps and I'm afraid your best bet is to reinstall all apps.

When I set up an SSD for my friend (same kinda setup as yours), I had to reinstall most apps as simple cloning did not work. It took a bit of time but at least all were freshly installed then
 
mc77 said:
I haven't tried Migration Assistant as I read that some people had problems using it for this purpose, but perhaps I should be giving this a try. Are you also using a ssd in your setup? If so, did you use Migration assistant?
Click to expand...

I did the install from scratch thing. Actually, the process was:

1) installed OS, created admin user
2) created user I normally use with home directory on HDD
3) logged out and back in with the userID I just created
4) installed apps and copied over data.

If you keep all of your data outside of the user's home directory, then putting the home directory on another drive is not necessary. Mail might be an issue depending on your specifics though.
 
No, my applications folder is only 8.73GB, so I have no idea why is was showing up so large. When you did this for your friend and freshly installed the apps, did you also transfer things like the documents folder and downloads folder etc?
 
mc77 said:
No, my applications folder is only 8.73GB, so I have no idea why is was showing up so large. When you did this for your friend and freshly installed the apps, did you also transfer things like the documents folder and downloads folder etc?
Click to expand...

I left all data on the hard drive. Only apps and OS X in the SSD.
 
Sorry if this seems like a stupid question, but are you sure it isnt the size of your home folder that is precluding the clone? If so move it to a HD. There are numerous threads here on that topic.
 
Hellhammer,

sorry for all my questions! But just wanted to clarify - with just os x and apps on the ssd, did you then have to point iphoto etc. to where the data is on the hdd or was there a way around this?
 
Cutterman,

right now my home folder is listed at 80GB, apps at 8Gb. Which alls seems normal - perhaps I'll have to search some more threads as you say maybe I am just missing something really simple
 
Thanks Hellhammer - I'm going to give things another try
 
if your Home Folder is on another drive, you shouldn't have to do anything to point your iTunes and iPhoto libraries to that data store. By default, iPhoto and iTunes want to place their libraries in your home directory.
 
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