MacBook Pro :: Swapping Optical Drive For SSD - How To Set It Up?
Jun 14, 2012
I'm going to purchase a Crucial M4 128GB SSD for my Late 2011 13" i7 Macbook Pro. I don't use my optical drive at all, so I figure I may as well swap that out for my current 750GB HDD, and put the SSD in the main harddrive bay. I know full well how to physically install the respective drives, but my confusion comes when cloning the current HD onto the SSD, then moving all your media files (music, movies, documents etc) over to the HD, while keeping your system files and applications on the SSD.
So what I really need, is a PROPER in depth guide from the start of the setup process (First boot after installation of physical drives) detailing how to copy my system files and applications over to the SSD so I can boot from it, while keeping my data & media files on the HD and being able to access them all as I normally would through finder.
I've ordered the 15" i7 with HiRes Glossy and the 500GB 72k last week. Now i'm one of the few lucky germans waiting for a volcano to stop bitching around so my new toy can get here... To shorten the waiting time, i've been a little around this forum reading about this and that. I came across several discussions about whether to use a SSD or a HDD. Reading them a thought crossed my mind: Why not remove the DVD-Drive (i use my DVD-Drive maybe once every 2-3 monts... for that an external drive would do) and replace it with a medium sized (say 128GB) SSD. One could put OSX on the SSD and have all the pro's of the SSD (instant boot times, etc...), while still being able to use the 72k HDD at the same time...
I have a 13" MacBook, and I'm swapping out the factory-installed 120 GB hard drive for a 320 GB one. I have been using it with the 120 GB disk, and I want to make a copy of it on the larger disk before I swap them. I have a fairly good idea of what to do, but I don't want to risk losing data, so I want to check and see what the best way to do this would be.Here's what I was thinking: along with the new drive, I bought an external enclosure. So, I was going to put the new disk in there, connect it to the computer with the original disk, and copy a clone of the internal disk to it. I was thinking of using Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner to do this (although I have never done that, so I'd appreciate it if you could walk me through making a bootable clone with either one). Then, once I essentially have two disks which are clones, I'll swap out the old disk for the new one (I know how to do the physical installation).
I just purchased a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 640GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive to replace my stock 120GB HD. I am really excited to have the extra space. I purchased this MBP a few months ago and would like to do a fresh install of Leopard. I have an external hard drive that I have not used yet and was wondering of the best way to install Leopard on the hard drive and then add my itunes library and iphoto library to the fresh 640gb hard drive. What kind of score do you imagine I will have once I upgrade the hard drive and bump the Ram to 4GB.
I have a 2011 macbook that has a motherboard that is broken, and that macbook has a terabyte Hard drive that was put in about a year ago after a broken hard drive was removed. Now I have bought a brand new macbook same model and I was advised by the apple store to take the old TB hard drive and swap it with the one in the new computer. I just want to know if by doing this I'm going to loose all of my files and programs by just swapping them. I have no back up anywhere just the files on the hard drive in the broken computer. So am I going to loose all of the files on the hard drive when I swap it? or will I have to get it backed up some how? They are both running Mavericks
If you want to do modify or upgrade a Macbook you Should first back up your music, documents, photos etc to an external hard drive. That much I did know. And lucky for me because a few later I spilt wine on the keyboard. (Computers are not wine oriented). Lucky for me it was saved by a Mac expert. The iTunes library which also includes non-Apple purchases is sitting in an external LaCie 1tb Rugged external hard drive. And what I want to do is transfer/import the iTune library Back into the Macbook. Sure it probably sounds easy to a vetran computer person or even to someone who grew up with computers but to me it's like speaking Cantonese.
Is there a way to safely loosen the screws on the bracket holding the hard drive in place on a mac book pro 17 inch? I've got one loose, but the other one simply won't budge and the head is starting to strip. the amount of downward force I'm having to exert to try to get it to move seems excessive to the point of dangerous to me. i'm using a Philips 00 screwdriver which is the correct tool, I believe, but I just cannot shift it. given that Apple say this is a user replaceable part, there must be an easy wy to do it, but all I can see me doing is more damage and being stuck with a captive screw that no one can move.
So my question is -- do you know if this would be an issue swapping drives from a 2009 Mac Pro to a 2010 running 10.6.5 on the drive? Is there an OS performance hit running the 10.6.5 from the 2009's drive on the 2010 Mac Pro?
The reason I ask is because I am upgrading to a 3.33GHz 6-core, it's ordered and on the way. When it comes, I would just like to swap my SSD from my 2009 to the 2010 (running 10.6.5) and hope that everything runs OK. I don't want to have to re-install the new OS X build from the system disks and then update it, I would like it just to work correctly on the new Mac Pro.
I was thinking of removing my DVD Superdrive and adding a SSD drive. Will I be able to put the DVD drive in an enclosure and use it as an external drive?
After some messing about on my computer (short story:inf loop, loop writes to container in memory), I've built up large chunks of swap space on my computer. The problem isn't space that's been used up, rather the locking up of the system when switching to another application. Since the hard drive IO is flooded by calls, and that the swap space is invariably fragmented across the entire drive (iDefrag currently shows 2 1GB swapfiles: 984 and 3873 pieces).
When I went back to working in Numbers (1 400kb document open), I got a beachball for about 5-6 minutes while the app was being read back into memory from the thousands of bits on my hard drive. Now, as my thread topic suggests: is there a way to dedicate a portion of the drive (preferably not a partition) of contiguous space only for swap space usage? Googling turned up a few *nix related methods, but the link below has a stack of comments titled 'stupid idea'. Can anyone break down the method (and why they think it's a stupid idea) in the link below? http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...11226102423514
So I have a Macbook (late 2008 model), and the optical drive essentially went bye bye. If I put a disc in, it will have trouble recognizing it and then it will eject out. Anyways, last night, I did some maintenance on OnyX and it said that my volume needs to be repaired. Even Disc Utility failed to finish and said that the "filesystem verify or repair failed."
The short of it, I need to put the Leopard disc in there and do a disc repair. However, is there a way, via firewire, where I could actually use my iMac's optical disc drive in place of the Macbook and connect via firewire, then do the disc repair? If so, what would be the specific way to do this?
I have a MacbookPro. The factory fitted DVD/CD drive plays dvds fine but spits out CDs [even originals]. I have Windows XP installed via bootcamp which doesn't cause me any problems.
My next Mac will be a laptop, and I will NEVER need the Macbook pro's power. I just web-surf and listen to music mostly. I only use the optical drive to watch dvds. But I have a separate player for my much larger TV now. So for say 99 percent of the time, an optical drive would be unnecessary. But I would buy apple's separate optical drive; which I think is a good idea. On my present computer, a first generation Mac Mini, the DVD drive is obviously obsolete now, especially when it comes to Blu-Ray. But what if a like in 2 years a new optical format comes out, or at least a much faster version? If I had a Macbook I would be stuck, never being able to upgrade the internal drive. If the Macbook's optical drive was easily upgradable, then this would be a no brainer.
So I have a 2.2GHz SR MBP, and the superdrive just went out on me. It will read and write to CDs, but won't recognize any DVDs that I insert into it. I bought a USB enclosure and DVD drive, and it works fine to read and write to DVDs when in Snow Leopard, but I am unable to boot from it (specifically so I can install Windows 7, but I can't boot SL either). I reboot and and hold down option, and only see Macintosh HD, not the disk I'm trying to boot off. I've cloned SL to my flash drive and I can boot off that fine, but unfortunately I'm unable to do that with Windows...
Any ideas? I've googled it and it seems like booting off a USB optical drive is supported, so I'm unsure why it's not working for me...
I had a MBA. I needed more RAM, higher CPU and larger drive capacity. So I changed to MBP. What I dont need is the optical drive. Apple should ditch the optical drive in MBPs or at least have an option not having an optical. Instead more battery and 2 disk bays.
How do I eject a CD that won't come out of the optical drive on a MacBook Pro . I have tried the ejcct key on the keyboard. There is no longer an eject disk on the drop down menus.
There is the hardware test, but it does not seem to include the Optical drive, I did the extended test and it says that everything is working fine, obviously it is not, everytime I insert a CD/DVD it plays it right, but it does not come out on its own and i have a hard time to get it out somehow, this happen exactly 1 week after the guarantee run out! I have a MacbookPro 15 inch 2.4GHZ, 2GB Ram 250 Hard Drive?
Can I just keep the existing system on my non-SSD HDD, and after having Lion on SSD keep just data and delete the system libraries? Or is it better to format the whole disk and restore data from time machine backup (so it is not fragmented..
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), MacBook Pro 2010
since 2 days my optical drive makes one very strange noise every time in "wake it up" or turn it on. The sound is done three times. I realized today that now I'm not able to put a disc into the drive, instead of "absorving" the disc, the drive expels it.
I want to keep the optical drive constantly spinning. I am running music for a dance recital, and all their music is on CDs and I would prefer not to rip it in. My problem is that for the rehearsals, every time they rehearse a new song, I have to wait minimum 10 seconds for the drive to spin up and load the song. Is there any way I can keep the drive spinning until im done with it? Or a way to temporarily load the CD into RAM?
Info: MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4), 2.2GHz i7, 8GB RAM
I've installed a Crucial M4 256GB SSD into the traditional hard drive bay of my Mid 2009, Macbook Pro (5,4). I started getting beachballs immediately after the least bit of intensive CPU usage and pinpointed the problem to be the faulty EFI 1.7 firmware update. I then downgraded to EFI 1.6, and the beachballs ceased, but the problem now is that the Hard Drive controller now only allow for up to 1.5 GB/s interfaces. With that, I'm now only using 25% of the speed potential of my SSD, which is quite frankly a waste of money.
I'm thinking of installing an optibay, in place of the optical drive and installing the SSD there, leaving my original hard drive in the original hard drive bay. The problem is, I don't know if this alternative will be worthwhile, as I have no idea how fast the Optical Drive's GB/seconds are. how fast the optical drive connector's GB/seconds is? If it's anything faster than 1.5, I'm definitely purchasing an optical bay for my HD.
I am thinking of buying the new macbook pro with retina display.I do not intend to get and external optical drive.I want to split the hard disk and install a windows 7 ultimate, which I own and have as an CD image ( ISO file ).
how can I install windows from my ISO without burning it into a CD or creating an external drive? is it possible?
Info: MacBook Pro with Retina display, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
