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SSD swapping question

estabya

estabya

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 28, 2014
722
770
I ordered a used 2011 MBP on eBay, and it is set to arrive Tuesday. My plan is to take the 240Gb SSD from my 2009 Mac Mini to use in the MBP. The drive has 10.10.3 on it. My question then is this: Will I have to reinstall OS X, or if I can just swap the drive over?

It will be such a hassle to move everything, swap the drive, reinstall OS X, and then move all my files and reinstall my apps again. Any reason just swapping the drive wouldn't work or is an inferior option? Thanks in advance!
 
estabya said:
I ordered a used 2011 MBP on eBay, and it is set to arrive Tuesday. My plan is to take the 240Gb SSD from my 2009 Mac Mini to use in the MBP. The drive has 10.10.3 on it. My question then is this: Will I have to reinstall OS X, or if I can just swap the drive over?

It will be such a hassle to move everything, swap the drive, reinstall OS X, and then move all my files and reinstall my apps again. Any reason just swapping the drive wouldn't work or is an inferior option? Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

You can just swap the drive over, because the existing OS X installation already contains all the drivers for every Mac that supports the version of OS X in your current drive.

So you could even stick this into a 2007 iMac and it'll still work fine. You could even put it in an external enclosure and boot it on a 2015 13" rMBP and it'll still boot fine.
 
yjchua95 said:
You can just swap the drive over, because the existing OS X installation already contains all the drivers for every Mac that supports the version of OS X in your current drive.

So you could even stick this into a 2007 iMac and it'll still work fine. You could even put it in an external enclosure and boot it on a 2015 13" rMBP and it'll still boot fine.
Click to expand...

That's good news! I thought I'd remember reading that it would work, but I wanted to confirm before I did it. Thank you!
 
estabya said:
That's good news! I thought I'd remember reading that it would work, but I wanted to confirm before I did it. Thank you!
Click to expand...

I did exactly this recently, swapped the SSD from a 2008 MBP to a mid 2012 MBP; went without a hitch. The only thing I needed to do was re-enter my Apple password a few times.
 
RedRaven571 said:
I did exactly this recently, swapped the SSD from a 2008 MBP to a mid 2012 MBP; went without a hitch. The only thing I needed to do was re-enter my Apple password a few times.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the confirmation! Good to hear about another success story.

I will post an update here when I get it switched over and running. It might be a couple days as I'm waiting for the 8gb of memory that I ordered to arrive before I open up the computer.
 
Little bit of an update.... instead of using my old drive, I decided to just order a new 240Gb SSD because A) The one in the mini was 3Gbps and I wanted one that was 6Gbps and B) I wanted to leave the SSD in the mini because using it with a HDD is painful :p

So now my plan is to install the SSD in the MBP, set it to target mode, then use disk utility on the mini to clone the drive over to the one in the laptop.
 
Just a quick update: Yesterday I sat down and installed the new SSD (Sandisk Ultra II 240Gb) as well as the 16gb of RAM that I had ordered. Then I booted into target mode and hooked up firewire between the MBP and my mini. I booted the mini to the recovery partition and copied the contents of the drive over to the MBP. After Disk Utility did its thing I unhooked and rebooted the MBP. It booted up just fine and asked for passwords for iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud, etc... Up and running great now.

It actually feels faster than my 2013 i7 macbook air, even just for mundane tasks.
 
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