Replacing HDD with SSD, few questions

[Tbone17]

Planning to replace my hard drive. Was told that I'll need a bootable usb stick and then to install the new drive and boot off the usb.

Last time I used carbon copy cloner and it went well, set up the drive in an external enclosure and then swapped it into the laptop.

Can I do the same again? Was told that carbon copy cloner doesn't work for 10.9 and also that I should do a fresh install.

Kind of lost with all this now. I have the new hard drive in an external enclosure and can connect and format it to the correct format but not sore how to install the OS X and then migrate all the data.

 

[CoastalOR]

CCC 3.5 & 4 will support OS 10.9.
http://bombich.com/download

Having a USB installer is not required. You can do it like you did before if you are happy with the performance of your current installation of OS 10.9.

I would;
Put the new SSD in the external enclosure & format it for Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Clone the old internal drive to the external SSD drive.
Boot from the newly cloned external and verify it works. If functioning properly then;
Install the new SSD internally.

 

[Tbone17]

Great thanks.
I'm planning to upgrade to El Capitan once I have the new drive installed. Also upgrading the ram. Overall happy with the performance right now but running out of space.

Will also be installing the data doubler to put the old HDD in place of the optical drive but want to make sure the SSD install goes well before doing that.

Is it much more work to do a clean install of the OS onto the new drive? I could install El Capitan straight onto the new drive but am worried that transferring all my data might be a pain with different OS'
[doublepost=1474343383][/doublepost]Great thanks.
I'm planning to upgrade to El Capitan once I have the new drive installed. Also upgrading the ram. Overall happy with the performance right now but running out of space.

Will also be installing the data doubler to put the old HDD in place of the optical drive but want to make sure the SSD install goes well before doing that.

Is it much more work to do a clean install of the OS onto the new drive? I could install El Capitan straight onto the new drive but am worried that transferring all my data might be a pain with different OS'

 

[CoastalOR]

Installing El Capitan is a new wrinkle not mentioned previously. It may no longer be available from the App Store (unless you previously downloaded it) since Sierra (10.12) is due to be released Sep 20.

You should have a good clone of your current OS before installing a new OS in case there is a problem, but I guess you would have your old install on the old HDD.

A clean install is more work to get everything back to normal. You could use the Migration Assistant app to transfer all of your data, accounts, settings, and apps to the new SSD after the installation of 10.11. Using Migration Assistant is not exactly a "clean install" since you are transferring your old settings, but you could try it, see if it works well, and do a clean install later IF you do not like the results.

 

[blindpcguy]

did you dl el capitan b4 sierra released because if not like the guy above said u won't be able to get it legitimintly through the mac app store. can ur mac run 10.12 why bother with el cap even if it can't it most likely could unofficially run 10.12