Macbook Pro SSD upgrade

[craig1]

I'm just looking for a bit of reaffirmation that I'm doing this properly as I know a few of you have Macs and may have done something like this.

I have an early 2011 Macbook Pro 15" i7. I'm getting more and more delays due to HD stalls and a bit of carnage from three years of upgrading software, it still has the original hard drive in and has so much stuff on it that I don't want to wipe and start again. What I want to do is upgrade the HD to a SSD one, cloning the existing HD. Yes, I know that best practice is to start from fresh but I really don't want to go through the pain of install OS, apps and so on then wait for half a day while the various updaters mess around, even then I think I'd have a bit of difficulty finding half my license keys and install media for some apps.

My plan:
Samsung 840 Evo 1GB SSD
USB 3.0 enclosure for the cloning process
Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my HD. Replace HD with SSD and hopefully the world will be all sweetness and light with a far faster experience. I'll then increase the virtual drive sizes for my VMs.

Known issues:
- I have no idea how I'll bring across my Bootcamp partition. I'll probably just bin it and start again with Win8. Probably less hassle all ways round.
- Licensing. I'm not sure how the MS licenses I have will tolerate cloning, I think the one that will be hit is Mac Office, the VM versions shouldn't care as all they see is a VMWare virtual drive rather than the physical drive itself. Anyone have any other opinions?

So, anyone see anything I've missed or that's known to go wrong? Any success stories or tips?

[administrator]

Yeah that should work fine! Let me Google it for you to reassure you even more
How to clone your old hard drive to your SSD (Mac) - Crucial Community

If you clone the hard drive it should copy the partitioning as well so the bootcamp partition should be as it is...

If I were you though I would bin it and install from scratch as you said Although with an SSD it will fly so probably no need, and what seems laggy now will be fast as you like but should you find it annoying in any way you will always be able to reformat and reinstall at the point. Cloning the hard drive is the safest and quickest way IMO as you will always have the old HD to fall back on if anything goes wrong.

Good luck!

[Bunk]

I did this a few weeks ago except I didn't use CCC. I followed this guide - How to Replace Your MacBook Pro's Hard Drive with an SSD. No problems, but make sure you've got the right screwdriver to remove the posts from the hard drive.

Edit: I should also mention, I have an early 2011 15" MBP too, and I got the same SSD.

[craig1]

Thanks

I tend not to trust some of the things I read on t'interweb as there's a lot of planted content, especially on manufacturers' websites. It's nice hearing from people who have done it on sites that have nothing to do with a tied product.

I just dug out my Torx screwdriver from my toolbag, it was tangled in my soldering kit for some reason. I'm impressed that I still have a small reel of the old proper solder with lead hidden away somewhere!

The most noticeable hard drive stall and lag is when I download stuff in my dedicated and very locked down torrent VM and transfer it on the fly to a locked folder on my Mac. It's taking about 1 minute per GB and thoroughly trashing any other downloads in progress. The analysis shows that it's the HD that's taking the punishment

P.S. Samsung are running a cashback offer on the 840 EVO range, might be worth checking purchase dates to see if you qualify.
P.P.S. I just remembered that my Mac is USB2.0 not 3.0 so I'm just going to use an old enclosure I have and leave it alone for the day while it does its business.

[craig1]

Yeah that should work fine! Let me Google it for you to reassure you even more
How to clone your old hard drive to your SSD (Mac) - Crucial Community

If you clone the hard drive it should copy the partitioning as well so the bootcamp partition should be as it is...

If I were you though I would bin it and install from scratch as you said Although with an SSD it will fly so probably no need, and what seems laggy now will be fast as you like but should you find it annoying in any way you will always be able to reformat and reinstall at the point. Cloning the hard drive is the safest and quickest way IMO as you will always have the old HD to fall back on if anything goes wrong.

Good luck!

Argh... that link had something I hadn't thought about: FileVault. Ah well, that's an overnight job tonight then setting that to decrypt. I want to increase the partition size and need to decrypt to do that.

Edit: Thinking about it... it might be worth migrating then decrypting... Yep, I'll go with that

[cojak]

Mr C did it for me - piece of cake.

[doodab]

Mr C did it for me - piece of cake.

Who needs a genius when you have a shaman?

[NickFitz]

I use SuperDuper rather than CCC, but I don't think there's really anything to choose between them. I've done several HD upgrades on my old MacBook that way, and never had any problems. One tip: take the time to ensure you can boot from the clone all the way to the Desktop while the new drive is still on the far end of the USB port. If there is any problem with the cloned image, you want to find out before you've put it in your Mac and screwed everything shut again

[craig1]

Doing the upgrade now and a misunderstanding on my side. I thought CCC would actually do a proper clone of the drive rather than essentially a file transfer. That makes things a lot easier as I now don't have to care about FileVault decryption.

Still need to put FileVault back on again once I finish the migration process...

[craig1]

Just finished cloning the drive. 360GB in 4hrs 40mins. I did get a bit confused about why it was "blessing" the drive at the end though!

The very sad and slightly disconcerting thing is that my test boot from the new drive in a USB2.0 cradle was far faster than my normal drive boot...