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Setting up an SDD boot drive

ghostchild

ghostchild

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 17, 2007
355
0
So I will be getting the Crucial SDD as a boot/app drive and I have a few questions. This topic might have been beaten to death but I'm pretty late to the game so please help a newbie out :eek: I got a new 3.2ghz quad Mac Pro with 24gb of ram and 1 x 1tb hd

1. I want to boot and store my apps on a SDD that I will install in my Mac Pro which I already have OSX installed onto my 1tb drive. How do I transfer my OS and apps onto the new drive?

2. Will I run into an inefficiencies? I'm talking about reformating and what not and saving files and moving them around across the different drives. I want to be able to do this seamlessly as if it was all under 1 hd is that possible?

3. Is there a step by step guide for this?

Thanks.
 
ghostchild said:
So I will be getting the Crucial SDD as a boot/app drive and I have a few questions. This topic might have been beaten to death but I'm pretty late to the game so please help a newbie out :eek: I got a new 3.2ghz quad Mac Pro with 24gb of ram and 1 x 1tb hd

1. I want to boot and store my apps on a SDD that I will install in my Mac Pro which I already have OSX installed onto my 1tb drive. How do I transfer my OS and apps onto the new drive?

2. Will I run into an inefficiencies? I'm talking about reformating and what not and saving files and moving them around across the different drives. I want to be able to do this seamlessly as if it was all under 1 hd is that possible?

3. Is there a step by step guide for this?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

FWIW, I used Superduper to clone my factory HD to my SSD.

Another option (probably preferred) would be just physically install the SSD and then pop in the install CD and install the OS. Update the drivers when you're done. Simple as that.

cheers
JohnG
 
Another option (probably preferred) would be just physically install the SSD and then pop in the install CD and install the OS. Update the drivers when you're done. Simple as that.

cheers
JohnG[/QUOTE]

This is what I'm doing as soon as my 3.2 Quad comes in, then just have your home folder on your mechanical drive
 
Latech

threadjack alert:
Are you setting up the Blacks as a RAID 0? Are those drives the RE versions?

thanks
JohnG
 
Pretty easy, I did it for the first time myself a few days ago.

* Get a 2.5" to 3.5" mounting bracket and a SATA cable to connect the drive to the main board

* Go to Disk Utility and use the Restore feature to copy your system drive to the SSD, then choose the SSD as your startup disk

* In User Accounts control panel you can control-click your account to get into advanced options and move your home folder to another drive.
 
Is there a way to physically move the folders to the new sdd after I install it? Or will that mess up the directories?

Does copying the system drive also replicate say for example the music/photos i have on my current drive to the ssd?
 
I agree with above post. Use SuperDuper to clone your 1TB drive to the SSD drive... But I would also beg, borrow or buy another external FW drive so you can 1st make another clone of the 1TB drive, just in case the SSD or internal 1TB drive fails while you are doing this swopping. :confused:
but here is where my knowledge is lacking. :( When you boot from the SSD you should be able to reach out to the internal 1TB drive and delete everything Except your user home area, but what I don't know is, how to identify to the OS that your user area is already on a separate drive..

Hopefully someone else can chime in...

Or did I misunderstand? Do you even have existing user data files that you need to keep, or is this a truly Brand New machine with no user data files on it?
 
This might help. That talks about moving your home folder too, there should be a link in that post as well.

As for installing it, you could either use the disk utility restore feature, SuperDuper!, or Carbon Copy Cloner, all of which do the same thing really.
 
Sorry to be dense...

I have read all of the discussions scattered across MacRumors, but have yet to find the clear answer. This forum topic "Setting up an SSD boot drive" is the perfect header, and in fact, the poster's questions are the perfect questions. But they do not seem to be directly answered. So if someone could guide, that would be great!

Specifically, my set up is the follows:

1. Mac Pro 2009
2. Boot drive is a WD 1TB Black, which has about 800 GB used.
3. All my data is on this drive (and is cloned every night to another WD 1TB Black for backup)

I just bought an OWC 120GB SSD, which I want to use as my boot drive. However, I am not sure what to do to set it up optimally and cannot find a walk-through.

I obviously cannot clone my current start-up drive as is to the OWC drive, given the space I use on the WD drive. Some suggest using Carbon Copy Cloner. Can I just tell it to copy only the "System" and "Applications" folders? Do I also need to include "Library"?

Or is there some other way specifically that someone with a 1TB startup HD should specifically set up an 120GB SSD for fast boot and application usage?

Thanks!
 
Re: Setting up an SSD boot drive

I had recently done this from info scattered through out the web, its pretty simple.

First and foremost is backup your entire system.

Make your drive selections, I bought a 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD (Boot Drive), and a WD Caviar Black 1TB (for Home Folder).
I formated the WD drive and copied my Home folder to it, once that was complete I went into the System Preferences, Accounts, unlock it, selected and right clicked on my account, and went into Advanced Options, went to the Home Directory box and clicked the Choose Button, I navigated my way to the Home folder I just copied to the new hard drive and clicked the Open button.
Once thats done Restart your Mac, the Home folder you just copied should now have Home icon used by the OS, thats a good sign so far, but make your data is all there and all is well before you proceed to the next step.

I then went back to my current boot drive and deleted my old Home folder, emptied the Trash, opened Carbon Copy Cloner and cloned my current boot drive to the new SSD.
After the drive was cloned I went into System Preferences and selected Startup Disk, and selected the SSD as my boot drive and then restarted.

I only used 20GB out of 120GB on my SSD and that's with all the Applications I currently have, I used over 100GB for my Home folder copied to my new 1TB drive.

That's how I went about it, no problems, things are definitely faster.
 
mrh63601, thanks for the discussion of what you had done. I'm going to follow this suggestion. I already had a fully cloned backup of my WD 1TB start up drive. So I went into the back-up version, confirmed it seemed to work fine, redirected the backup to use the start-up's home directory and am about to delete the home directory off of the back-up drive. So that leaves my original start-up drive fully intact and gives the backup only the contents I wish to clone to my new SSD start-up drive.

If all works ok, I'll end up recloning my original WD HD back to my original WD HD backup drive, just to have two full-scale redundant HDs ready to go.

Thanks for the advice... Home folder deleting now... Fingers crossed.




mrh63061 said:
I had recently done this from info scattered through out the web, its pretty simple.

First and foremost is backup your entire system.

Make your drive selections, I bought a 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD (Boot Drive), and a WD Caviar Black 1TB (for Home Folder).
I formated the WD drive and copied my Home folder to it, once that was complete I went into the System Preferences, Accounts, unlock it, selected and right clicked on my account, and went into Advanced Options, went to the Home Directory box and clicked the Choose Button, I navigated my way to the Home folder I just copied to the new hard drive and clicked the Open button.
Once thats done Restart your Mac, the Home folder you just copied should now have Home icon used by the OS, thats a good sign so far, but make your data is all there and all is well before you proceed to the next step.

I then went back to my current boot drive and deleted my old Home folder, emptied the Trash, opened Carbon Copy Cloner and cloned my current boot drive to the new SSD.
After the drive was cloned I went into System Preferences and selected Startup Disk, and selected the SSD as my boot drive and then restarted.

I only used 20GB out of 120GB on my SSD and that's with all the Applications I currently have, I used over 100GB for my Home folder copied to my new 1TB drive.

That's how I went about it, no problems, things are definitely faster.
Click to expand...
 
I did see this referenced bozz2006 a good number of times in the various posts. While it is a component of what I need to do (e.g., point my SSD start-up to a home directory on another drive), it doesn't address my key question which is about optimal strategies about how to only copy over to the SSD what I need to make it a boot drive.

That being said, it is certainly a helpful post for that piece of the process. Thanks.

bozz2006 said:
I followed the step-by-step guide found HERE, and it works perfectly.
Click to expand...
 
You have two HDDs right? The way I'd do that is to erase your backup, and follow the instructions on that site to make the back up HDD into the home HDD. Then I'd install the SSD and use superduper to clone the boot HDD over to the SSD and designate the SSD as the boot volume. Wipe the boot HDD and make taht your backup.

You may be able to get by figuring out only the things that you need to copy, but this way it'd basically be fool-proof; no chance of screwing it up and forgetting to copy something and messing up the whole system. Do it the way I said and it won't take long.
 
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