Post upgrade summary

Work ordered me a new drive (512 GB SSD) and 16 GB RAM kit to upgrade my 13-inch, Late 2011 Macbook Pro from 256 GB/8GB.  I have too much that I keep running at the same time, such as, migrating from VMWare Fusion (Windows XP) to Parallels (Windows 7) on the C/C++ side and  Netbeans 8.1 for the Java development.  When I want to run both applications (which talk to each other and accomplish one task) I'll have a lot of memory in use at one time... although, right now, I'm only running at 4.something GB real memory used.  So here is the upgrade summary. Pretty easy ... after all my worry.

I put the new drive

In a case I got cheap (like $6 for 5) on Amazon ,

and slid it into the Seagate tray.  Actually, I had to trim part of the opening using an box-cutter (do this at your own risk) as I mentioned here before.  I trimmed the top (thicker, nearer the lid of the box) this time.  These trays were meant for a different drive tray but they work, so I'm happy.

Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the existing 256GB SSD internal to the new drive.  It allowed me to also copy the hidden volume on the original Apple drive, which was important.  I will buy this product although just the try-me version was great, I really liked it, so I'm paying for it.

The clone didn't take that long, then I cracked the case carefully following these instructions at Apple. I also had peeked at these at iFixit earlier so knew about the drive removal and necessary tools.  I put in my 16 GB RAM and the new 512 GB SSD and it worked!

I am happy I also cloned the hidden partition.  Prior to the install, I booted holding down the D key and ran diagnostics on the hardware to find no problems.  This was when trouble-shooting with Apple about why the machine was re-booting for no apparent reason. The current suspected reason is a bad USB cable. More on that later, maybe.

In any case, after the upgrade I again booted holding down the D key and ran diagnostics with the new drive and RAM in and once again, no errors.  So I'm pretty confident right now.

Well, that's it.