Upgrading - Need Help - SSD

[aaw0701]

I just purchased a mid/late 2012 Macbook Pro 13' 2.9 GHZ i7 750 GB HHD notebook. Although this is not my first rodeo with Apple i have been a PC user and I am out of my comfort zone. As the days go on its getting easier, reading a bunch of books and really diving into the whole MAC thing.

The one thing I will say this machine is awesome and its about to get even better.
I've decided to upgrade. I am going to put in 16 GB of RAM vs. the 8 GB of RAM and also take out the optical drive and put in a SSD drive. Yes I am aware it will void my warranty but who cares right. Warranties are like dental insurance, good for nothing!

I have purchased the following from amazon:

Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch (7mm) SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive
SATA 2.5" / 9.5mm 2nd Hard Disk Drive Caddy Adapter

Of couse as well as the RAM and a neat little tool box. I aslo found great you tube videos on hoe to do it, not worried there.

I do have a time machine and carbon copy cloner too.

My goal is to run all of my applications as well the necessary startup system files off of the SSD drive and make it the bootable disk, and use my 750 GB HHD as the drive to hold my music, movies, documents etc.

Here are the questions:

I know I need to clone my hard drive. Will the clone also contain all of the programs I've installed for example Parallels 8 with windows 7 as well as some other programs or will I need to reinstall all those programs again?

As far as moving all of the essential system files and everything necessary to run the machine and boot to the SSD drive how would i move that off of the HHD drive and onto the SSD drive? What should the approach be?

Thank you

 

[flattyre]

Good luck cloning your 750GB drive to a 250GB. It's probably simpler for you to install anew on the 250GB.

 

[aaw0701]

I only have 125 GB being used at the moment

 

[Risco]

Why don't you just use Time Machine? Let it reinstall everything again, but untick your music / movies / documents in the user section. Then once installed, use Time Machine again to transfer your music / movies / documents to the second drive.

 

[Buckaye]

I had great luck with carbon copy clone - and it's free for 30 days.

did I read this right that your planning to put the SSD drive in the optical slot? why not put it in the main slot so you get the benefit of the drive on boot?'

I just did a similar upgrade and moved my HDD to the optical slot... on my 2008 MBP it is screaming fast now on boot.

 

[aaw0701]

Thank you for you response... You brought up something new to me...

Are you indicating that if I put the SSD in the optical slot that I can't get the benefit of making it the boot drive?

I can't configure it to use the optical slot with the SSD and tell the computer to boot from that drive?

 

[newdeal]

Keeping the ssd in the optical bay makes sense. You can set the startup drive in settings and the main bay is the only one with the sudden motion sensor for the hard drive. I doubt you need 16gb of ram but its cheap so why not. As for moving your files to the ssd just install it, use carbon copy cloner to clone the recovery and then the drive contents, reboot from the ssd, format our hdd and transfer your media to it. Parallels etc will copy fine with carbon copy cloner or time machine. If you have windows installed in bootcamp it will not, if you have it installed as a virtual machine file then carbon copy cloner will clone that no problem. Time machine likely wont as usually the virtual machine file is excluded from time machine backups sincr the smallest change requires time machine to backup the whole thing again which would fill the backup disk in no time. Also when you installthe ssd you should use trim enabler to enable trim for the drive and disable suspend to disk because if you dont since you have 16gb of ram 16gb of your ssd will be taken up by a sleep image file and will be written when the computer goes to sleep. If you regularly let the computer sleep until the power dies on it and dont save your work prior to sleeping you would be screwed but otherwise there is no reason to have it write the memory contents to disk when it sleeps




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Thank you for you response... You brought up something new to me...

Are you indicating that if I put the SSD in the optical slot that I can't get the benefit of making it the boot drive?

I can't configure it to use the optical slot with the SSD and tell the computer to boot from that drive?

Yes you can. Just goto systempreferences, startupdisk and select the ssd partition as the startup disk

 

[aaw0701]

Keeping the ssd in the optical bay makes sense. You can set the startup drive in settings and the main bay is the only one with the sudden motion sensor for the hard drive. I doubt you need 16gb of ram but its cheap so why not. As for moving your files to the ssd just install it, use carbon copy cloner to clone the recovery and then the drive contents, reboot from the ssd, format our hdd and transfer your media to it. Parallels etc will copy fine with carbon copy cloner or time machine. If you have windows installed in bootcamp it will not, if you have it installed as a virtual machine file then carbon copy cloner will clone that no problem. Time machine likely wont as usually the virtual machine file is excluded from time machine backups sincr the smallest change requires time machine to backup the whole thing again which would fill the backup disk in no time. Also when you installthe ssd you should use trim enabler to enable trim for the drive and disable suspend to disk because if you dont since you have 16gb of ram 16gb of your ssd will be taken up by a sleep image file and will be written when the computer goes to sleep. If you regularly let the computer sleep until the power dies on it and dont save your work prior to sleeping you would be screwed but otherwise there is no reason to have it write the memory contents to disk when it sleeps




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Yes you can. Just goto systempreferences, startupdisk and select the ssd partition as the startup disk

Thank you newdeal I understand 90 percent of everything youve said except this: "the main bay is the only one with the sudden motion sensor for the hard drive"? I never knew there was a sudden motion sensor and how will this upgrade impact it?

 

[newdeal]

Thank you newdeal I understand 90 percent of everything youve said except this: "the main bay is the only one with the sudden motion sensor for the hard drive"? I never knew there was a sudden motion sensor and how will this upgrade impact it?

The sudden motion sensor detects sudden motion of the computer and parks the head of the hard drive so that it doesnt flop around during the sudden motion and hit the spinning platters causing damage. Only the main bay has this so its best to keep spinning drives in the main bay. If you had only an ssd and not a hdd as well you could put the ssd in the main bay and then you would use terminal commands to disable the sudden motion sensor since it is not needed for an ssd as there are no moving parts

 

[theluggage]

Are you indicating that if I put the SSD in the optical slot that I can't get the benefit of making it the boot drive?

There's no problem booting from the optical slot.

However, with some MacBook Pro models, there were issues with running high-speed 6Gb/s SATA III SSDs in the optical bay, so the safest bet was to move the slow old spinning disc to the optical slot and put the SSD in the main slot.

However, according to this blog post these issues have been fixed for the 2012 13" MBP by an Apple firmware update.

 

[aaw0701]

Carbon Copy Cloner

There's no problem booting from the optical slot.

However, with some MacBook Pro models, there were issues with running high-speed 6Gb/s SATA III SSDs in the optical bay, so the safest bet was to move the slow old spinning disc to the optical slot and put the SSD in the main slot.

However, according to this blog post these issues have been fixed for the 2012 13" MBP by an Apple firmware update.

I have completed my upgrade but I have a question regarding carbon copy cloner. I went ahead and cloned my hard drive to my new SSD drive but my windows 7 parallels did not copy as well as my outlook for mac email.

I thought if you are making a clone it is just like the hard drive you are cloning? Any thoughts?

 

[aaw0701]

I have completed my upgrade but I have a question regarding carbon copy cloner. I went ahead and cloned my hard drive to my new SSD drive but my windows 7 parallels did not copy as well as my outlook for mac email.

I thought if you are making a clone it is just like the hard drive you are cloning? Any thoughts?

I wanted to expand on what had happened using CCC.... All of my application transfer and cloned but the data within them did not for example my application parallels 8 cloned or transfered but the copy of windows 7 ultimate did not. Another example is office for mac 2011 cloned or transfered but my emails and emails boxes did not. Again if you are making a clone of one hard drive to another why didn't this information transfer over/ Does this mean I will need to reinstall windows 7 into my virtual parallels machine? did I miss a setting. Not sure what to do..???