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Wanting to install SSD in 2011 MBP

T

theMouthPiece

macrumors member
Original poster
May 9, 2007
53
1
Wales, UK
Hi All

OK, so I want to upgrade the internal HDD of my MBP to a 500GB SSD version and I was wondering if this process would work.

Several years ago I replaced the optical drive in the MAC with a 750GB drive, and I wish to keep that drive in place as it contains stuff I need, what I want to replace is the current 350GB internal and main OSX drive originally supplied with the machine.

So, would I be able to remove the 750GB drive, replace this drive temporarily with the new 500GB SSD - having done a Time Machine restore to make that SSD a copy of my current 350GB bootable drive. Then replace the original 350GB HDD with the 500GB SSD, and reinsert the 750GB HDD where it was. I then want to upgrade to OSX High Sierra.

Is that a workable process folks...? or is there a better way...?

Thanks
 
That would work, but you are making it harder than it needs to be.

Just install the new 500GB SSD in the main slot then option key boot to the TM drive. That will bring up a recovery screen. From there use DiskUtil to format the new drive, then restore the TM backup to the new SSD.

When you are all done and booted to the new SSD, open System Prefs and set the new disk as the startup disk.
 
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Alternately, you could get a USB to SATA cable, use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your system drive to the new SSD, check to see if it works by booting from it, then swapping the two drives.
 
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If you have a Time Machine backup, just use that. If not, then buy an external USB HD case (they are so cheap!) and use that to transfer your system back onto the new internal SSD.

That is exactly what I did with my 2011.

EDIT: Depending on what you're planning to do with your current internal main HD, just buying a USB to SATA cable would be enough. Either way, you're looking at 10 bucks to make everything a lot easier.
 
OK, here's my way.
Follow it and I guarantee 98% success.

Buy the SSD. Almost any one will do.

Get one of these (cheap and useful to have around):
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-5-...478&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=sabremt+usb3+to+ssd

Download CarbonCopyCloner from here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html
CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days.

Buy the following tools if you don't have them:
- Phillips #00 driver
- TORX T-6 driver

When you have all these things:
1. Connect SSD to the USB3 adapter and connect to MacBook
2. Open Disk Utility and erase/initialize SSD to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled.
3. Quit DU and open CCC
4. Accept CCC's defaults for now.
5. Put your internal drive "on the left". Put your "target" (the external SSD) to the right.
6. Let CCC do its thing (it may take some time).
7. If CCC asks if you wish to also clone the recovery partition -- YES YOU WANT TO DO THIS.

When CCC is finished, do this next:
1. Power down, ALL THE WAY OFF
2. Press the power on button
3. IMMEDIATELY hold down the option key and keep holding it down until the startup manager appears
4. The external SSD should now appear (along with the internal drive). Select it with the pointer and hit return.
5. Do you get a good boot? If so, "take a look around" -- everything should look JUST AS IF IT WERE YOUR INTERNAL DRIVE. You should probably check "about this Mac" (apple menu) to be sure.

If this is ok, you're good to go to the next step:

First, go to ifixit.com and view the repair guide for swapping the drive on your MacBook. It's an easy procedure, but VIEW THE GUIDE FIRST.

1. Power the Mac off, again.
2. Do the drive swap. The hardest part is removing/replacing the screws on tha back.
3. I recommend that you DO NOT disconnect the battery cable. Things will be fine.
4. Once the drive is swapped, put the back in place and put ONLY A FEW SCREWS IN to "tack it in place" for your test boot, coming next.

Test boot and startup disk setup:
1. Press the power on key, and again, hold down the option key until the startup manager appears.
2. Select the new internal SSD (should be the only choice) with the point, hit return.
3. MOMENT OF TRUTH -- do you get a good boot?
4. If so, get to the finder, then open System Preferences
5. Open the startup disk preference pane and RE-DESIGNATE the SSD to be the boot drive
6. Close System Preferences.

At this point I recommend that you power down and reboot AGAIN, to see if the startup disk re-designation "took".
If it did, you should see a quick boot (instead of the slower one with the old HDD).

OK -- if you have gotten this far, now it's time to replace ALL the screws in the back cover.
DON'T DRIVE THEM IN TOO TIGHTLY -- you don't want to strip them.
Just "good enough" is good enough.

Final recommendation:
I suggest you run with the "old OS install" that was previously on the HDD, for at least a week or so before thinking of "upgrading the OS further".
You want to be sure the drive is behaving properly before you start fooling with the software on it.

Good luck, and again, if you follow these instructions, success is 98% guaranteed ! ;)
 
Last edited:
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Many thanks all for some super replies.

Fishrrman said:
OK, here's my way.
Follow it and I guarantee 98% success.

Buy the SSD. Almost any one will do.

Get one of these (cheap and useful to have around):
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-5-...478&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=sabremt+usb3+to+ssd

Download CarbonCopyCloner from here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html
CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days.

Buy the following tools if you don't have them:
- Phillips #00 driver
- TORX T-6 driver

When you have all these things:
1. Connect SSD to the USB3 adapter and connect to MacBook
2. Open Disk Utility and erase/initialize SSD to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled.
3. Quit DU and open CCC
4. Accept CCC's defaults for now.
5. Put your internal drive "on the left". Put your "target" (the external SSD) to the right.
6. Let CCC do its thing (it may take some time).
7. If CCC asks if you wish to also clone the recovery partition -- YES YOU WANT TO DO THIS.

When CCC is finished, do this next:
1. Power down, ALL THE WAY OFF
2. Press the power on button
3. IMMEDIATELY hold down the option key and keep holding it down until the startup manager appears
4. The external SSD should now appear (along with the internal drive). Select it with the pointer and hit return.
5. Do you get a good boot? If so, "take a look around" -- everything should look JUST AS IF IT WERE YOUR INTERNAL DRIVE. You should probably check "about this Mac" (apple menu) to be sure.

If this is ok, you're good to go to the next step:

First, go to ifixit.com and view the repair guide for swapping the drive on your MacBook. It's an easy procedure, but VIEW THE GUIDE FIRST.

1. Power the Mac off, again.
2. Do the drive swap. The hardest part is removing/replacing the screws on tha back.
3. I recommend that you DO NOT disconnect the battery cable. Things will be fine.
4. Once the drive is swapped, put the back in place and put ONLY A FEW SCREWS IN to "tack it in place" for your test boot, coming next.

Test boot and startup disk setup:
1. Press the power on key, and again, hold down the option key until the startup manager appears.
2. Select the new internal SSD (should be the only choice) with the point, hit return.
3. MOMENT OF TRUTH -- do you get a good boot?
4. If so, get to the finder, then open System Preferences
5. Open the startup disk preference pane and RE-DESIGNATE the SSD to be the boot drive
6. Close System Preferences.

At this point I recommend that you power down and reboot AGAIN, to see if the startup disk re-designation "took".
If it did, you should see a quick boot (instead of the slower one with the old HDD).

OK -- if you have gotten this far, now it's time to replace ALL the screws in the back cover.
DON'T DRIVE THEM IN TOO TIGHTLY -- you don't want to strip them.
Just "good enough" is good enough.

Final recommendation:
I suggest you run with the "old OS install" that was previously on the HDD, for at least a week or so before thinking of "upgrading the OS further".
You want to be sure the drive is behaving properly before you start fooling with the software on it.

Good luck, and again, if you follow these instructions, success is 98% guaranteed ! ;)
Click to expand...

Just a quick question here though please Fishrrman... As far as I am aware, my MacbookPro does not have USB3, only USB2. Will this SATA-USB£ interface work with my Macs USB2 ports or is there an alternate cable adapter I ned please?
 
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"Will this SATA-USB£ interface work with my Macs USB2 ports or is there an alternate cable adapter I ned please?"

The USB3.1 adapter (link posted above) will work fine.
And someday when you move up to a faster Mac, and it will work better.
 
Fishrrman said:
"Will this SATA-USB£ interface work with my Macs USB2 ports or is there an alternate cable adapter I ned please?"

The USB3.1 adapter (link posted above) will work fine.
And someday when you move up to a faster Mac, and it will work better.
Click to expand...

Awesome thanks.

So, we're on the way... the USB -> SATA adapter and Crucial 500GB SSD have been duly ordered from Amazon, arriving tomorrow. Going to download CCC later this evening. When I get home from work tomorrow evening I will initialise the SSD and set off the cloning of the main HDD whilst I go to bed... then when I return later that evening I can start the reboot processes you described.

Thanks again Fishrrman!
 
So Fishrrman... a few quick questions if I may please.

I initialised the SSD, cloned from internal HDD with recovery partition, powered down fully and rebooted from USB using the SATA cable you suggested I purchase.

All looks mainly to be OK, but not quite 100%! All my apps appear to be working fine, but there are some minor items such as; my DropBox app asked me to sign in again and my iCloud account isn't logged in automatically etc. I can log in fine with both of them, but for some reason they seem to have defaulted to 'need to sign in again' wheras I didn't have to do this when I boot as normal from the internal HDD. I shall have a further dig around later today before I swap the drives.

Apart from these minor niggles, at the moment after only a small amount of time testing prior to going to work, everything else I have checked seems to be OK. I have launched a number of smaller apps as well as some more intensive ones such as Final Cut Pro X, and they all seem to run OK... they launch quite slowly, but they run. I assume they launch slowly due to the limitations of using this SSD over a USB2 connection and as soon as I swap the boot drives and insert the SSD into the main body of my Mac caddie and connect using the internal SATA cable, all will launch faster, yes?

I plan on doing further testing this later this evening when I return from work.

Thanks again.
 
The OP wrote:
"All looks mainly to be OK, but not quite 100%! All my apps appear to be working fine, but there are some minor items such as; my DropBox app asked me to sign in again and my iCloud account isn't logged in automatically etc."

I don't use iCloud (at all), or DropBox, but I'm going to -guess- that this has something to do with the fact that the physical drive the software is running on has changed.

My advice:
If you need to log in again, re-enter passwords, etc. -- just do it, and forget about it.

"Apart from these minor niggles, at the moment after only a small amount of time testing prior to going to work, everything else I have checked seems to be OK. I have launched a number of smaller apps as well as some more intensive ones such as Final Cut Pro X, and they all seem to run OK... they launch quite slowly, but they run. I assume they launch slowly due to the limitations of using this SSD over a USB2 connection and as soon as I swap the boot drives and insert the SSD into the main body of my Mac caddie and connect using the internal SATA cable, all will launch faster, yes?"

Yes.
If the "test boot" is running ok -- and it appears that IT IS -- the next thing to do is power down and "do the drive swap".

Then boot again -- now from the faster internal SATA bus -- and tell us how things run.

One other important step -- DON'T FORGET -- once the new drive "is in", you have to go to the startup pref pane and RE-DESIGNATE it to become your startup disk.
 
Last edited:
theMouthPiece said:
So Fishrrman... a few quick questions if I may please.

I initialised the SSD, cloned from internal HDD with recovery partition, powered down fully and rebooted from USB using the SATA cable you suggested I purchase.

All looks mainly to be OK, but not quite 100%! All my apps appear to be working fine, but there are some minor items such as; my DropBox app asked me to sign in again and my iCloud account isn't logged in automatically etc. I can log in fine with both of them, but for some reason they seem to have defaulted to 'need to sign in again' wheras I didn't have to do this when I boot as normal from the internal HDD. I shall have a further dig around later today before I swap the drives.

Apart from these minor niggles, at the moment after only a small amount of time testing prior to going to work, everything else I have checked seems to be OK. I have launched a number of smaller apps as well as some more intensive ones such as Final Cut Pro X, and they all seem to run OK... they launch quite slowly, but they run. I assume they launch slowly due to the limitations of using this SSD over a USB2 connection and as soon as I swap the boot drives and insert the SSD into the main body of my Mac caddie and connect using the internal SATA cable, all will launch faster, yes?

I plan on doing further testing this later this evening when I return from work.

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

If you're interested, boot from your old HDD, open the "Keychain Access" app, on the top left section, press "Local Items", on the bottom left section, press "Passwords" and likely those things now require a password on the new SSD but not on the old HDD will probably show up there. Unfortunately, I would guess because of security reasons, you can't export these. If you use Migration Assistant, it should be able to transfer these (it did for me when I was doing testing using a single website password but who knows if it works in all cases). There's also a method in this link:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3649122
You'd have to click on "All replies" and search for "Long way:". I don't know if this works.

Because you've already done the clone, I would just re-enter the passwords. Who knows if you try something these other alternatives that you won't make matters worse. So you used CCC? Interesting that it doesn't transfer these - maybe security once again or something proprietary Apple does.
 
Fishrrman said:
Then boot again -- now from the faster internal SATA bus -- and tell us how things run.

One other important step -- DON'T FORGET -- once the new drive "is in", you have to go to the startup pref pane and RE-DESIGNATE it to become your startup disk.
Click to expand...

UPDATE:

So, I have updated the SSD, did the tests as you suggested, then swapped out the internal HDD for the new SSD and I am pleased to report that everything is running perfectly.

One slight issue - but this is to do with my Mac and not the process of updating the SSD. I used OS El Capitan for a few days until I was happy, then I did the High Sierra update. It worked, and most apps on my Mac were running OK'ish, but some of them were awful, so I decided to revert back to El Capitan and admit that this is probably the most up to date OS I can safely update on my Early 2011 MacBookPro.

Specifically, Final Cut Pro wouldn't work, when I updated it to the latest version, it was so slow to be entirely unusable. LogicProX surprisingly, worked very well though. General YouTube videos seemed to hog masses of CPU and though they played back fine, they rendered my doing anything else on the Mac cumbersome and sluggish.

I am happy with El Capitan, and have done all the requested security and app updates related to that OS, so it's fine. The time will inevitably come soon enough when I will need to save and purchase a new MBP.

I would like to ascertain what's happened to my mac though, as the fans are always on, and the simplest of regular tasks do often seem to go slowly - I think there may be a temperature sensor issue (or a real hardware issue) causing the CPU to throttle. I have seen some companies that do component level Logic Board repair, which might be a good bet. Louis Rossmann in New York has an excellent YT channel where he does daily repairs on camera. I have found a company in the UK that does similar Logic Board repairs - this might be a good short term solution that would enable me to keep this MBP for another year or two while I save for a new one.

I may post a new thread outlining these issues and see where that takes me. Many thanks for your help Fishrrman on this thread though (and everyone else), I am very happy with this SSD upgrade.

Greets....
 
You can look in the activity monitor for the dreaded OS X kernal task throttling, which kicks in after several minor hardware failures like a defunct sensor or a depleted battery that do not really harm the usage. you can disable the kernal task throttling with this guide: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/kernel_task
this guide is worth a sticky imho, because posts about throttled Macs pop up regularly and this throttling ist just a planned obsolescence function, so it should be widespread knowledge how to get rid of it.
 
Is there any difference if the disk utility is used to restore the internal HDD to the SSD instead of CCC?
 
The OP wrote:
"I would like to ascertain what's happened to my mac though, as the fans are always on, and the simplest of regular tasks do often seem to go slowly - I think there may be a temperature sensor issue (or a real hardware issue) causing the CPU to throttle."

Questions:
What size display is on the 2011 MBP that you have?
Is it 13"?
Or is it 15" or 17"?
 
Fishrrman said:
The OP wrote:
"I would like to ascertain what's happened to my mac though, as the fans are always on, and the simplest of regular tasks do often seem to go slowly - I think there may be a temperature sensor issue (or a real hardware issue) causing the CPU to throttle."

Questions:
What size display is on the 2011 MBP that you have?
Is it 13"?
Or is it 15" or 17"?
Click to expand...
It's a 13" model, Firshrrman.
 
"It's a 13" model, Firshrrman."

OK, just wanted to ascertain that it wasn't a 15" or 17", with a potential "RadeonGate" problem.
 
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I use FCPX regularly. You may have stumbled on any one of the following issues:
- On Sierra, you shouldn't have the "latest" FCPX, 10.4.3. Within the last few updates, there was a requirement to have 10.13.2. So if you have somehow managed to get 10.4.3 on Sierra, that could be a problem.
- Do you have Perian (Sys Prefs)? If so, it's a holdover from days gone by, and not doing anything for you now - except causing issues with FCPX.
- There was an issue where MBPs with GT750M GPUs, and connected to external displays set to non-native resolutions, caused molasses-grade slow-downs. While not strictly affecting FCPX users, a lot of us seem to fit this criteria. Example: 4K display set to 1440p.
 
Fishrrman said:
"It's a 13" model, Firshrrman."

OK, just wanted to ascertain that it wasn't a 15" or 17", with a potential "RadeonGate" problem.
Click to expand...

Okies.

I am about to start a new thread on here re the throttling issues I am experiencing with my MacBookpro. i will go into some detail to explain... would appreciate you taking a look if you have the time please sir? (Will take me a little while to write it out...)

kohlson said:
I use FCPX regularly. You may have stumbled on any one of the following issues:
- On Sierra, you shouldn't have the "latest" FCPX, 10.4.3. Within the last few updates, there was a requirement to have 10.13.2. So if you have somehow managed to get 10.4.3 on Sierra, that could be a problem.
- Do you have Perian (Sys Prefs)? If so, it's a holdover from days gone by, and not doing anything for you now - except causing issues with FCPX.
- There was an issue where MBPs with GT750M GPUs, and connected to external displays set to non-native resolutions, caused molasses-grade slow-downs. While not strictly affecting FCPX users, a lot of us seem to fit this criteria. Example: 4K display set to 1440p.
Click to expand...

Great information thanks.

I had installed High Sierra and had to upgrade FCPX - and it was this version that slowed to less than snails pace :)

I do have my system set to an external display, well dual actually, but I don't think I have that particular GPU as mine is integral in the CPU I believe (lower quality).

Thanks for the info though. I am about to post a new thread with the current issues I am experiencing on my MBP... if you're interested... :)
 
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