Having just bought a 500GB SSD I need to clone my HD onto the SSD before swapping them over.

Any recommendations for SW to do this?

Time Machine?

I cloned mine last night using SuperDuper, simply because I’d seen it recomended a few times. It was a piece of cake to use but the jury is out on its effectivness because I need a T6 screwdriver to fit the SSD.

Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper are what I use for that sort of thing.

because I need a T6 screwdriver to fit the SSD

You can buy sets of about 100 security driver bits for £10 these days. They’re low quality, but ideal for pulling apart electronic things which seem to favour them. I got one from Screwfix years ago.

yep, mine is still £9.99:

http://www.screwfix.com/p/all-purpose-screwdriver-bit-set-100pc/15297

Carbon Copy Cloner is what I used. I cloned my HDD onto a USB drive, then installed the SSD, booted off the USB drive and cloned it onto SSD.

Use an external disk caddy and disk utility, easy peasy.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhNma0ZjrWs[/video]

I’ll probably use use a SATA to USB cable and clone the drive, then swap it over.

Super Duper is £19 vs £28 for CC, so I’ll try SD.

If you don’t need to schedule, autoupdate and additional scripting, then just use superduper for free…

I think you can use CCC for free during the 30 day trial?

If you don’t need to schedule, autoupdate and additional scripting, then just use superduper for free…

Even better!

The free version of Super Duper still does all the drive cloning stuff. IIRC you clone your HD to an external HD, install the new drive, boot into the external HD (hold ALT at startup), run Super Duper again and this time copy the other way. I keep a Super Duper partition on my TM drive for doing fresh installs, one of the best things about having a Mac IMO.

vs £28 for CC

Fair enough, it was fully free when I used it last year, didn’t know they charged for it now. Good bit of software though.

bookmarked for later 🙂

You can buy sets of about 100 security driver bits for £10 these days.

I’m a buy-1-decent-tool-at-a-time kinda guy…I can’t be doing with the clutter and it messes with my head that I won’t use 95% of the box 😕

Of course, I was cursing that policy last night 😀

You probably know, but after cloning you should be able to boot from the external drive just to be sure it’s all ok before breaking out the towel, sticky tape and screwdrivers..

27 to do my old MacBook Pro, hope they’ve got a bit easier!

You probably know, but after cloning you should be able to boot from the external drive just to be sure it’s all ok before breaking out the towel, sticky tape and screwdrivers..

My main concern is that I’ve bought the right size SSD!

Toshiba 7mm SATA-III 512GB THNSNH512GCST

7mm sounds about right.

Not sure why you’re even considering using Super Duper etc (for a cost) when the OS has a perfectly good utility included that will do this for you?!

Cloning now in progress, using the free 30 day trial of CC.

Think the lead I’ve borrowed is only SATA II as it’s taking an age, will probably take most of the night to copy 210 Gb.

i do mine every other month in work and use super duper not had an issue with it yet.

Quick hijack……..What’s the difference between Sata-II and Sata-III ?, i have a 480gb 5200rpm in my 2008 Unibody Macbook 2.4gz intel core 2 duo with 4gb (max) of memory and i think i need a larger hard drive as it is filling up. Would a SSD (750gb) make much difference to the speed of the machine?, any advice on specific drives to look at?.

All done. Seemed to speed up and complete the clone in 3 hours after taking nearly an hour to do the first 30Mb.

Sata IIi is faster than Sata Ii. Can’t recall by how much. However the overall speed is only as fast as the slowest bit out of: Motherboard interface, HD interface, HD itself etc. 5200 rpm drives are quite slow.

You can get very cheap hybrid drives. £75 for a 1TB 5200 rpm drive with a 64 GB SSD built in. This is a good option. A 750 Gb SSD would cost £500. My 500 Gb SSD was £320. If you need more than 500 Gb I’d just buy a bigger HD or a hybrid drive.

Hybrid drive for MBP: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00BHRWHNI

Wow, what a difference. Copying 3000 16Mpixel photos from my D4 onto the SSD and the processing them all is way faster than with the old HD!