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Jul 23, 2014
4:09:48pm
I swapped my hard drive for an SSD in my laptop last weekend. WOW. I should
have done that a long time ago. The difference is HUGE in my mid-2012 Macbook Pro (non retina).

It cost me about $118 total. Here's what I got:

SSD Drive: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...e-20&m1k=vb_im

USB Hard Drive enclosure: Amazon.com: Sabrent USB 3.0 To 2.5-Inch Sata Aluminum Screwless Hard Drive Enclosure Black (EC-RD25): Computers & Accessories

You also need the proper size phillips screw driver and proper size torx screw driver. There are lots of instructions on the internet showing how to do the upgrade. My basic steps were this:

1. I put the new SSD into the external hard drive enclosure. It didn't quite fit all the way and I didn't want to jam it in so I just inserted it into the connectors enough for the connectors to fit.

2. I plugged in my new SSD (which was only half-way in the enclosure) into the USB slot on my Macbook Pro via the included USB cable.

3. I used Carbon Copy Cloner (free trial) to clone my hard drive to my temporary-external SSD drive. Carbon Copy Cloner also asked if I wanted to make the backup/archive partition (whatever it's called) and I said yes.

4. At that point, my SSD had a mirror image of my hard drive and I removed the SSD from the enclosure. I followed some internet instructions on how to open up my Macbook, swap out the hard drive with the SSD drive. I included the spacer that came with the drive to make it fit properly.

5. That's it. I put it back together and booted it up and everything was fine. The only software hiccup was that I needed to fix my Google Drive storage because it detected that I had changed drives. There was no other setup or installation involved.

6. Since I had the now empty enclosure, I put my old hard drive into it. It is now my spare USB external drive.

I love the SSD drive. LOVE it.
Cougar-Duck
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heberjoe
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Cougar-Duck
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