Hi everybody. A colleague of mine has a mid 2012 mbp ( with 500GB HDD and 4GB of RAM) and he could not reinstall the OS, so asked for help. He uses the laptop for email, reading and a lot of Netflix. I could do Internet recovery after many attempts and installed Mountain Lion but when I went to www.netflix.com it said that the browser was outdated etc. Also sometimes the machine did not boot. I found that there is a common problem with the SATA cable on this model. So I have changed the SATA cable and upgraded the RAM to 16GB. It seams now that the laptop boots every time without problem. But I also wanted to upgrade the HDD to a SSD so I bought a 480GB EMTEC SSD. To avoid the netflix problem I wanted to install Catalina but there is no way I can install Catalina on that SSD. Then I put the SSD in a SATA to USB adapter and tried installing Catalina and voilà - the OS install and works without problem. Why it installs via USB and not via SATA? Right now I am installing Catalina on the HDD but I have read that APFS is not a good match for HDD-s though primarily working with large files - far from my colleagues' usecase. I do not know if there will be any performance hit that he will notice. Also I wanted to put a SSD on it for better user experience and to give a new life to that old laptop.
I would appreciate any help. Thank you.
P.S. I thought of clonning (dd) the HDD with Catalina to the SSD but unfortunately the HDD is a little bit larger.
I would appreciate any help. Thank you.
P.S. I thought of clonning (dd) the HDD with Catalina to the SSD but unfortunately the HDD is a little bit larger.
