1TB HDD (12.5mm/2.5") drive in MBP13/15/17 - Success
Just want to let you know that you can safely & nicely install a 12.5mm 2.5" in the Unibody MBPs. Physical installation in the laptop is simply great - like it was designed to hold these drives (probably it was ). I did it in 13", but the 15 & 17 will do as good.
Similar drives (12.5mm) are available also from WD (750G & 1TB, I think). The add thickness is because they are 3 platters, vs the usual 9mm, 2 platter drives.
I’ve got the 1TB Toshiba @ 5400rpm (MK1059GSM) and am very happy with. The previous disk was a 500G Momentus 7200.4, but the Toshiba seems to be doing just great! It’s much more silent now and double the space! And almost as fast too. And it costs me just about 85EUR (tax incl) from a retail shop here. I’m very happy.
Think i’ll postpone the OptiBay/DualDrive (SSD addtion) purchase for now. The 1TB Toshiba appears to be a very adequate solution based on 2-3 days of use & testing.
I used the OS X install DVD to do the cloning. ~450GB of data in about 10hours over USB including the data verification.
i also tried with CCC, but it’s much slower.
the instructions for this method are:
boot from the installation DVD
Start Disk Utility from the Utilities menu in the installer
perform a “restore” using the old drive as source and the new as destination.
3a. alternatively, if you have a time machine backup of your current data, the OS X installer allows you to restore your system from it. Did with the previous disk upgrade and it’s perfect.
what do you guys think my best option would be for cloning my HDD onto my new SSD? I’ll be doing it in a couple of weeks when I go home for the easter weekend. I have a 250GB drive in atm, have a 240 SSD and a 750 WD HDD with optibay waiting for me.
My plan is to clone the existing HDD onto the SSD (what is the quickest way? was gna temporarily stick the SSD in the optibay and CCC it over) then switch over and put the 750 in the optibay and move my home folder across.
Yeah i did a Time Machine restore but it failed twice. Turned out to be a bad drive, so i sent it back.
Using CCC because my pal uses it and its worked every time.
I was gonna do Time Machine or restore with Disk Utility but i just thought id give CCC a go.
Looking like its gonna finish around the 8 hour mark on 470gb.
If it doesnt work ill just use Disk Utility restore. The Time Machine fail has put me off a bit.
The way I did it was to copy all important things to a external HDD, think twice about what I copied and what else needed copying
Grounded myself, then opened the MBP up, unplugged the battery, took out the Optical unit, took out the original HDD. grounded myself again, put the SSD in, put the new HDD in the optibay and into the MBP, plugged in the battery, screwed the bottomplate back to the MBP, flipped it over and installed OSX from a USB drive.
In short, a fresh install is always better. Also, unplug the battery during install to avoid electrical issues and to reset the SMC (this is to avoid any future issues).
LOL Karlos - the CCC failed me twice for some reason and i left it behind . Good to hear it was a defective drive and you caught it so early. I always do a full format or a full read/write test on a new drive before i put it in production.
the installer approach is definitely faster in my experience. The restore is doing “bit copy” operation with the “dd” command(almost sure bout that), which is more optimal then the rsync approach of CCC. If you have a USB time machine backup, it’s also a good option, as you can install the new drive internally and push the “suck” button from the USB backup
it’s likely that your SSD disk will come with both SATA and USB ports. If so, i’d boot the installer, connect the SSD with USB, while the old drive is still inside and use the “Restore” option from Disk Utility.
I have a 1TB time machine (which hasn’t been updated since october because i left it in England), so I guess I could just update the time machine (which I would do anyway as an insurance policy) and then swap out the drives and restore over USB with the OSX disc…
Would that be significantly slower than any of the other drive cloning options?
Sure. I’m thinking from my point of view, seeing as I have a 60GB SSD. So I only want the essential on my SSD, all other stuff like the Home folder, movies and such on my conventional HDD.
And starting clean, I avoided all problems I read in forums, like programs not finding their settings after things were moved, etc.
fresh install is very tempting! I wish I did a fresh install with this hdd upgrade, but I didn’t, as it would have been for the sake of it’s own. Still running the original OS X install from Oct 2009 and can’t find a reason to rebuild it yet. It’s the third HDD in the MBP and still the original OS (actually my first OS X machine ever )
BTW, having the entire Home folder on a spinning platter is not the best, IMO. I mean, there are lots of I/O operations happening with the user’s profile folder and it’s best to leave them on the SSD for very fast access & operation. What i’d suggest to do is to just have the “Music”, “Downloads”, "Movies, “Pictures” and “Documents” on the spinning platter (the static content) and everything else on the SSD. That is mostly because of the Application Data & Local Settings folders - the system is extensively using them.
Not sure if such complication is really worth, but to me it’s the perfect separation of SSD vs HDD content on your setups. I’m currently preparing this as a two partition layout on the 1TB toshiba. I’m using softlinks/shortcuts to make it all look as if it’s one drive setup only and all the paths are as expected by default. Next step could be to rebuild the OS anew - I’m sure a fresh OS will run better after all those years of trails and errors.
speaking of which… i just put my ssd in my macbook! yayyy it runs so fast
but traktor gave me an error that i needed to reset the root directory to a default value… (which it referanced my old HD -the 250 that came with it - and the filepath there…)
CCC just failed on me again. Another 7 hours wasted.
I have feeling that its the USB Caddy at fault. The cloned HD (not ssd) boots in the caddy as GUID but states SMART status Not Supported. When the cloned HD is in the Mac it wont boot and Disk Utility states Master Boot Record not GUID. It was defintely formatted correctly.
CCC will resume the sync, so restarting the CCC process it will save you time.
you can boot from the caddy, but know that my caddy was also giving me griefs on one of the USB ports (with CCC). I then changed the other port and used the image restore.
Time machine restore should be about the speed of the image restore option. Leave it for the night and by the morning it should be done … since you trust the TM drive and you know it works fine on the proper USB port, it should be hassle free, I guess …
Only have this one and to be honest its a piece of cheap crap… possibly the only time i have scrimped on gear. Works ok as a caddy to boot from for my older full HDs.
As its getting late i may just install OSX to verify that the disk is good and then use Migration Assistant in the morning with the Time Machine option.
I dont actually want to clone the drive i just wnat iTunes and traktor.
Problem is i have 11,000 tunes that somehow are READ ONLY so they wont copy by just dragging the iTunes backup.
I guess Migration assistant or TM will copy them.
or i may just stay up for another 5 hours doing it !!!:eek:
). I did it in 13", but the 15 & 17 will do as good.