I've just installed a Crucial M500 480Gb in my early 2011 MBP. It's not been particularly easy, but the results seem pretty good so far.
I originally tried to install Mavericks on the new SSD. I attached the SSD to the MBP using a Seagate FW adapter, and then install from a Mavericks USB drive. This appeared to work fine, and I then copied my old Mac HD to the SSD using migration assistant. This did however take about 24 hours. When I rebooted, from the SSD, after the grey screen the MPB just shutdown. So I rebooted from my old HD.
I swopped the SSD to a USB 3 connection (via a Caldigit TB station) - and tried to reinstall Mavericks. At this point the installer said the SSD was locked. I reformatted using Disk utility.
Finally, I installed the SSD in the MBP and installed using the USB drive. I attached the old HD via USB3, and used Migration assistant to copy my Apps and User files to the new SSD, which took about three hours, and now everything looks fine. I wish I'd done this rather simple route first.
The old HD is now in the Optibay, so I've still got the old System drive available (The HD is partitioned into a System partition and a data partition)
I'm in the process of moving my parallels VM's to the SSD to try to improve performance there, and also my Lightroom catalogues.
But, I've got a /Users/Shared folder on the old HD which hasn't been mirrored to the new HD. The directory exists, but isn't populated with the same files. Some I've eliminated, but not sure what to do with the rest. Should I just copy these over to the new SSD in the same relative location?
Now I'm also wondering if I should enable TRIM support on the SSD?
I originally tried to install Mavericks on the new SSD. I attached the SSD to the MBP using a Seagate FW adapter, and then install from a Mavericks USB drive. This appeared to work fine, and I then copied my old Mac HD to the SSD using migration assistant. This did however take about 24 hours. When I rebooted, from the SSD, after the grey screen the MPB just shutdown. So I rebooted from my old HD.
I swopped the SSD to a USB 3 connection (via a Caldigit TB station) - and tried to reinstall Mavericks. At this point the installer said the SSD was locked. I reformatted using Disk utility.
Finally, I installed the SSD in the MBP and installed using the USB drive. I attached the old HD via USB3, and used Migration assistant to copy my Apps and User files to the new SSD, which took about three hours, and now everything looks fine. I wish I'd done this rather simple route first.
The old HD is now in the Optibay, so I've still got the old System drive available (The HD is partitioned into a System partition and a data partition)
I'm in the process of moving my parallels VM's to the SSD to try to improve performance there, and also my Lightroom catalogues.
But, I've got a /Users/Shared folder on the old HD which hasn't been mirrored to the new HD. The directory exists, but isn't populated with the same files. Some I've eliminated, but not sure what to do with the rest. Should I just copy these over to the new SSD in the same relative location?
Now I'm also wondering if I should enable TRIM support on the SSD?