How To Install Memory And An SSD Drive Into A Macbook Pro
29http://www.pcmech.com - In this video, David does an upgrade to a 2011 Macbook Pro, installing 12 GB of memory as well as an OWC 240GB Mercury Electra 6G SSD drive.
Now, this video would have shown the hard drive preparation process as well, but I began having mic issues. However, here it is in short:
(1) BEFORE I took the laptop apart, I did a full clone of the old hard drive onto an external Firewire drive. For this, I used Carbon Copy Cloner.
(2) I then did the upgrade as shown above.
(3) When complete, I booted the laptop using the cloned image from the external drive. To do this, I held down the OPTION key while I turned it on and I held the key down until the startup manager came up. I then selected my external drive and booted the machine.
(4) From there, I opened up Disk Utility and I partitioned the new SSD drive. I simply set up a single partition. I then did a quick format on the drive, just for good measure.
(5) I then used Carbon Copy Cloner again to re-clone the external drive to the SSD drive.
(6) When it was done, I turned everything off, unplugged the external, then rebooted normally. Only this time, it booted from the SSD automatically.
Booyah. Major speed increase.