I just want to share my experience installing an SSD in my MacBook Pro, as a newbie, in case any other not-so-experienced users are thinking about doing so. First off, I encountered a lot of problems during this, and others can mitigate this problems when they actually perform the surgery. My MacBook Pro had a 500 GB hard-drive, and I was moving to a 256 GB one. Thus, I used SuperDuper! to clone the drive, after deleting all the extraneous files I did not really need, or moved to an external hard drive, thus making the total file size less than 256 GB. But Mountain Lion (and applies to Lion as well) had a trick up its sleeve to disturb me. SuperDuper! tried to backup .MobileBackups. All the files I deleted were all still there in .MobileBackups, until my Crucial M4 SSD was filled, and the backup failed. Wasted one night of file transfer. Instead,Time Machine must be turned off before the cloning. Besides, I keep encountering problems of files not being found, and being able to be copied, making all the backups fail, and I had to reboot and use Disk Utility to repair disk, etc to fix these problems. For those newbies like me attempting this, please do so. When I restarted the Mac, it did not detect the SSD after the surgery. I had to hold the Option key, to boot into the Mac from the SSD, and change the startup disk in System Preferences. Hope this helps any newbie like me!
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Installing SSD in MacBook Pro.
- Thread starter caspersoong
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Wow my install was much easier. I took out my stock 500GB HDD and placed it in an external enclosure. Installed the new SSD crucial M4 and booted from my lion Internet recovery thumb drive. I installed lion then restored from Time Machine. The whole process took about two hours. Very simple upgrade IMO.