2015 Macbook Pro and 2013 MacBook Air SSD Switch

[Mheat94]

Hi all,

Not sure if this is the right place to post this question, I am new so excuse my mistake if this is the wrong place.

I have a Mid 2013 13" MacBook Air and a Early 2015 13" MacBook Pro. I am thinking about giving away the Air to a friend, but I would like to switch the 256GB SSD in the Air with the 121GB SSD in my Pro. After some research, I have found that they are compatible so in terms of hardware, I can switch them.

My question is whether or not there will be an issue on the software end. Like with the Air SSD think the computer is a MacBook Air after I place that in the Pro? Would the correct way be to clone Pro drive onto the Air drive and clone the Air drive onto the Pro drive? I realize this wording is confusing but main question is whether cloning would be the right way to do things.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Audit13]

Yes, you can switch drives without the drives misreading the hardware info.

You can clone using third party software or use time machine or a fresh install of the os and restore apps during the os set up process.

 

[ZapNZs]

If you wanted to do a straight clone, you could purchase an enclosure like the Envoy Pro (these are $$), download Carbon Copy Cloner, throw the old 128 SSD in the enclosure, throw the 256 SSD in the MBP, boot into the external enclosure, and then clone the contents of of the 128 SSD onto the 256.

After you do this, pop the 128 SSD into the MBA, boot into the recovery partition, and reinstall macOS to wipe everything and start fresh.

IIRC, it is worth noting that you are going to see a some performance decrease in SSD speeds. I believe the read and write speeds of the 256 MBA SSD from that generation are about 1/2 that of your MBP's 128 SSD.

 

[Mheat94]

Yes, you can switch drives without the drives misreading the hardware info.

You can clone using third party software or use time machine or a fresh install of the os and restore apps during the os set up process.

I was planning to do a fresh install but I think I'll create a clone just in case. Thanks!
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If you wanted to do a straight clone, you could purchase an enclosure like the Envoy Pro (these are $$), download Carbon Copy Cloner, throw the old 128 SSD in the enclosure, throw the 256 SSD in the MBP, boot into the external enclosure, and then clone the contents of of the 128 SSD onto the 256.

After you do this, pop the 128 SSD into the MBA, boot into the recovery partition, and reinstall macOS to wipe everything and start fresh.

IIRC, it is worth noting that you are going to see a some performance decrease in SSD speeds. I believe the read and write speeds of the 256 MBA SSD from that generation are about 1/2 that of your MBP's 128 SSD.

Thanks for putting the process in clear steps as I was unable to lol
Yea I installed Disk Speed Test and found that the MBA read speed was about 800MBPS while the MBP was about 1300MBPS... I figure I need the extra storage over extra read speed. Hopefully it won't be too noticeable since the MBA SSD speed is still pretty fast