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Simple SSD questions for new install (Now w/SOLO-X2)

crjackson2134

crjackson2134

macrumors 601
Original poster
Mar 6, 2013
4,850
1,958
Charlotte, NC
I finally ordered a Samsung 840 Pro 500 GB. It is to be my OS / APP drive and will be in a special sled for now. I'll get a PCIe card later.

I don't want to install from scratch and I want to have a restore partition on the SSD. I'm thinking there are 2 good ways to move my boot drive to SSD;

1) Use DU to Restore the new drive from the old spinner.

2) Use TM to restore from a fresh backup.

What do you recommend and why?

Also, I've read in Forums that some people clone the drive and then must somehow do some sort of sector realignment. What's that about, when is it needed, and how does one go about doing that?

Thanks for your help.
 
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I just installed a SSD in a MBP and it was painless and I'm happy with the results. Basically, the computer is exactly as it was before I started, restore partition and all.
1. Back up via TM
2. Download Mavericks installable from App store
3. Mount a 8mb USB drive and make it a Mavericks installable
4. Install new SSD
5. Install Mavericks to new drive
6. Restore via TM

This should help: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-create-a-bootable-os-x-mavericks-usb-install-drive/

Good luck. I'm happy to answer follow up questions.
 
Thanks, but I'm thinking the fresh install can be skipped. I'm pretty sure a TM restore will take care of it but I'm not 100% sure it will recreate the restore partition. I already have an updated Mavericks USB installer if in fact I do need to go that route.
 
I simply used Carbon Copy Cloner

It's free for (IIRC) 30 days, worked fine including recovery partition.

Thinking of actually purchasing, but haven't yet.
 
TruckdriverSean said:
I simply used Carbon Copy Cloner

It's free for (IIRC) 30 days, worked fine including recovery partition.

Thinking of actually purchasing, but haven't yet.
Click to expand...

Look at the bold text in the original post. CCC and other 3rd party software were the reason sector realignment was needed from what I've read. I don't want to deal with that as I have no clue what it is or how to correct it afterwards IF it actually occurred. Since I'm moving from a 1TB drive to 500GB drive, I think the possibility of this happening would be increased. I don't really know what I'm talking about here, just reflecting on the posts of others. I just want to get it right the 1st time and with the least fiddling.
 
crjackson2134 said:
Look at the bold text in the original post. CCC and other 3rd party software were the reason sector realignment was needed from what I've read. I don't want to deal with that as I have no clue what it is or how to correct it afterwards IF it actually occurred. Since I'm moving from a 1TB drive to 500GB drive, I think the possibility of this happening would be increased. I don't really know what I'm talking about here, just reflecting on the posts of others. I just want to get it right the 1st time and with the least fiddling.
Click to expand...

Yeah sorry. Read that later. I didn't have any of those problems (went from 1TB spinner to 480GB SSD). Always better to be sure though
 
Also, I've read in Forums that some people clone the drive and then must somehow do some sort of sector realignment. What's that about, when is it needed, and how does one go about doing that?
Click to expand...

I don't think Sector alignment should be an issue with CCC. Not if you first format the new drive with Disk Utility as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Disk Utility will create the hidden EFI Partition which begins on sector 40. Following that will be your System partition.

Use CCC to clone your existing partition to the newly-created one. Sectors shouldn't be an issue at all since you are cloning Volumes and not the entire drive.
Unless, of course, the creation of the Recovery Partition somehow throws things off.

Some people obsess about sectors on SSDs, since Apple doesn't use the 1MB offset (sector 2048). Windows and Linux automatically format drives to begin the first volume at sector 2048 and this supposedly lines up with Erase Block size and Page size (I forget all the terminology now).

It is possible to begin the EFI partition on sector 2048 instead of Sector 40, but it is a bit of a pain. iPartition is one method. GParted (Linux) is another way to do it. You can, believe it or not, create an EFI partition in Linux that OS X's Disk Utility will accept. And you place it on whatever sector you like (except the first 30-something which are unusable).
 
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When I went to an SSD (mounted on a Solo x2 PCIe card) I cloned the drive using the cloning feature in Apple's Disk Utility. There's also one in TechTool Pro. In TechTool Pro you have the choice of cloning the whole drive (Duplicate Cloning) (if the SSD is the same size or larger than your old boot drive). If it's smaller, you can't clone the whole drive, you will need to File Sync clone.

In any case, you should also download and enable Trim for your new SSD. It enables automatically on Apple drives, but need's Trim Enabler to work on Non-Apple drives.

Available here:

http://www.cindori.org/software/trimenabler/

And contribute, Cindori is one of the good guys.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
When I went to an SSD (mounted on a Solo x2 PCIe card) I cloned the drive using the cloning feature in Apple's Disk Utility. There's also one in TechTool Pro. In TechTool Pro you have the choice of cloning the whole drive (Duplicate Cloning) (if the SSD is the same size or larger than your old boot drive). If it's smaller, you can't clone the whole drive, you will need to File Sync clone.

In any case, you should also download and enable Trim for your new SSD. It enables automatically on Apple drives, but need's Trim Enabler to work on Non-Apple drives.

Available here:

http://www.cindori.org/software/trimenabler/

And contribute, Cindori is one of the good guys.

Lou
Click to expand...

Now when you say cloning feature of Apple's Disk Utility, are you talking about the Restore tab or something else?

I'm going from a 1TB drive to a 512GB SSD.

----------
Studio K said:
I don't think Sector alignment should be an issue with CCC. Not if you first format the new drive with Disk Utility as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Disk Utility will create the hidden EFI Partition which begins on sector 40. Following that will be your System partition.

Use CCC to clone your existing partition to the newly-created one. Sectors shouldn't be an issue at all since you are cloning Volumes and not the entire drive.
Unless, of course, the creation of the Recovery Partition somehow throws things off.

Some people obsess about sectors on SSDs, since Apple doesn't use the 1MB offset (sector 2048). Windows and Linux automatically format drives to begin the first volume at sector 2048 and this supposedly lines up with Erase Block size and Page size (I forget all the terminology now).

It is possible to begin the EFI partition on sector 2048 instead of Sector 40, but it is a bit of a pain. iPartition is one method. GParted (Linux) is another way to do it. You can, believe it or not, create an EFI partition in Linux that OS X's Disk Utility will accept. And you place it on whatever sector you like (except the first 30-something which are unusable).
Click to expand...

Would Time Machine restore the Recovery Partition? It seems that would be the simplest way to accomplish this.
 
^^^^Yes, Apple calls it Restore.

Going from a 1TB Drive to a 512GB Drive, this won't work. But, as I indicated, if you own TechTool Pro, you can accomplish this. I've never used Time Machine, but I've read that it's slow, and sometimes doesn't transfer non Apple applications.

Lou
 

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808? said:
Unless your actually data is <500GB, then a restore is not going to work.
Click to expand...

Only 133 GB is being used on that drive. I've got many other drives that I use for large file storage. This SSD is not intended to be used for anything other that boot / and Apps.
 
808? said:
Unless your actually data is <500GB, then a restore is not going to work.
Click to expand...

Again, the size of the data on the 1TB HDD really doesn't matter. Even if the data on the HDD is than a MB - Apple's Restore utility won't work. The Target drive needs to be the same capacity or smaller in size than the Source drive.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
^^^^Yes, Apple calls it Restore.

Going from a 1TB Drive to a 512GB Drive, this won't work. But, as I indicated, if you own TechTool Pro, you can accomplish this. I've never used Time Machine, but I've read that it's slow, and sometimes doesn't transfer non Apple applications.

Lou
Click to expand...

Does TechTool Pro have a trial version that would accomplish this. It looks like a 1st class app.
 
flowrider said:
Again, the size of the data on the 1TB HDD really doesn't matter. Even if the data on the HDD is than a MB - Apple's Restore utility won't work. The Target drive needs to be the same capacity or smaller in size than the Source drive.

Lou
Click to expand...

CCC would do this also, even using the 30 day trial.
 
crjackson2134 said:
Does TechTool Pro have a trial version that would accomplish this. It looks like a 1st class app.
Click to expand...

I don't think so, but there's someone on eBay that's selling a full downloadable copy of the app, with a working serial number for $30.00. That's less the cost of an Upgrade from MicroMat.

I bought my copy from the eBay seller 2 weeks ago, and it works just fine. And, was cheaper than my upgrade price would have been. Once downloaded and installed, you need to download the V7.0.3 Update.

Here:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/TechTool-Pr...rivers_Utilities_Software&hash=item1c3f677798

Lou
 
crjackson2134 said:
Does TechTool Pro have a trial version that would accomplish this. It looks like a 1st class app.
Click to expand...

Techtool Pro is $100, I believe. I don't know if it has a trial version that would allow you to do what you want to do with it.

I never use Time Machine anymore, because I don't like it at all. That's why I switched to Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC does have a free trial version.

Why not just format the new SSD in DU, then CCC the OS X volume to the new drive? A partition to partition clone won't mess around with sector-alignment/offsets.
CCC does create the Recovery Partition, but you probably have to go the Advanced Options and enable that. Shouldn't be hard to figure out, though. I remember doing it. It works fine.
 
DU was used here in the last 30 days to clone a HD device to a SSD device. Had to resize the HD down to match the SSD size but that was the only wrinkle in cloning.

Have had no issues so far and am liking my Crucial m500 (480GB) unit.
 
Okay, thanks for all the great ideas. I was hoping I could just restore everything using TimeMachine even though it's slow. I use it all the time and have had to restore more than a couple of times after mucking around with things I shouldn't have. It's always worked fine for me. I think I did this a long time ago (restore TM backup to a blank drive) but I was going from a 1TB to a faster 1TB drive. I didn't think to check and see if it made a recovery partition at that time.

I've went ahead and pulled the trigger on the TechTool Pro and it just finished installing the updates. I have it making a compressed disk image of the drive right now. I assume I can simply install the SSD and restore the image to the new smaller drive.

If not, thine I'll do the Volume clone option and see what happens.

Thanks again.
 
crjackson2134 said:
Okay, thanks for all the great ideas. I was hoping I could just restore everything using TimeMachine even though it's slow.
Click to expand...

You can. If your TM backup was made with Lion 10.7.2 or later the recovery partition is copied to the TM disk and you can just option key boot to the TM disk and get the recovery screen. From there just erase the new disk to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) then quit Disk Util and click restore. The recovery partition along with the OS and all your data will be moved to the new drive.

No need for any other tools.
 
Weaselboy said:
You can. If your TM backup was made with Lion 10.7.2 or later the recovery partition is copied to the TM disk and you can just option key boot to the TM disk and get the recovery screen. From there just erase the new disk to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) then quit Disk Util and click restore. The recovery partition along with the OS and all your data will be moved to the new drive.

No need for any other tools.
Click to expand...

Okay, thanks. I wasn't sure about the recovery partition. This clears it up perfectly.
 
Okay, so I installed the SSD today. I put it in a USB 3.0 enclosure, connected it to the inateck card.

I booted into a TM recovery session and restored my latest backup to the SSD. It took roughly 15 minutes and it was done. I pulled out the drive 1 sled, and replaced it with the SSD (after removing from the enclosure and mounting it to a special SSD sled).

I rebooted and it works perfectly. I enabled Trim Support through terminal commands and rebooted. Trim is active now.

I was expecting a faster boot, and more pop to opening/closing of my applications but I'm not disappointed. It takes about the same time to boot, and applications are a little faster. I think some indexing was going on or something. I did change the drive volume name so I expect that caused reindexing to take place.

I do notice that FCPX and Photoshop opens up WAY faster though. I have some more drive / data shifting to do now, and I'm pretty confident I'll be well pleased with the drive.

Thanks for all the suggestions. In the end, TM was crazy fast to restore and everything seems perfect so far.
 
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