With a little planning, upgrading to a fast solid state drive like the Crucial M550 SSD — or the newer — is doable for many handy MacBook Pro owners. After you decide to get rid of your old and slow hard drive and replace it with a new and wicked-fast Solid State Drive (SSD), the question is how? You will have to open up the sleek case of your MacBook or MacBook Pro and mess around with magic. Are you up to the task?
Feb 18, 2015 I copy my entire 120GB SSD including OS to new Samsung 850 EVO SSD. I didn't take out anything from this video, you are watching me clone an active C: drive that is my OS/Boot drive.
What tools do you need? Don’t stress. It’s not so hard. Here’s the all the key steps to make it easy: 1. Find an SSD Drive You can spend hours or days agonizing over which SSD drive is slightly faster than another, but it’s best to choose the biggest Crucial or Samsung SSD you can afford and get on with your life. Personally, I believe the offers the best bang for your buck, but the is slightly faster and offers a few more gigabytes of storage on each drive — buy according to your budget. The Crucial BX200 offers great speed and value for an SSD drive.
Get a Toolkit You’re going to need a toolkit that has tiny screwdrivers to handle some very small screws, most notably Phillips (#00) and Torx T6. You can likely get away with a cheap kit, but the risk is hitting a stubborn screw and stripping out a cheap screwdriver, leaving your upgrade on pause until you can get another screwdriver. Check out the or the to cover most of your bases now and in the future. Get a Drive Enclosure or Cable While you can recreate your Mac with a brand new install by manually copying over files and recreating all your settings, the easiest way is to clone your entire existing hard drive onto your new SSD. Then you can remove the old hard drive and swap in the new SSD, which will let you get up and running super fast.
Avoid the cheap and slow USB 2.0-based drive enclosures because your clone process could take 6-to-12 hours. A USB 3.0 drive enclosure or cable will cost a bit more, but the speed is worth it. Try the or the. * Bonus: If you use the enclosure method, put your old hard drive inside it and use it as a backup drive or for extra portable storage.
Get Your Cloning Software You can mess around with Apple’s Time Machine, but I personally prefer the simple, direct ease of. Carbon Copy Cloner shines when you buy it outright and is excellent for backups, but you can create a fully bootable copy of your hard drive with the trial version. Walk Through Online Guides Before You Crack the Case It’s a very good idea to familiarize the process by watching an online video or step-by-step guide online. Surgeons practice and visualize, and you should, too.
Check out by selecting the Mac model you want to upgrade. For a video, check out the guide by Matt Gonzalez below — it shows how to boot from a recovery USB stick as an alternative to cloning your drive: 6. Plan Your Time The cloning process will likely take a couple of hours depending on how much data you have to move.