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.

Using Thunderbolt Seagate "tray" for any drive.

I just got the new drive!

I used the Cable Matters 2.5" SATA Hard Drive case to enclose my HGST Travelstar.  It did not work "out of the box" because the opening of the Cable Matters box was slightly too small. I whittled away at the bottom, then at the top. In hindsight I think whittling all the change at the top would have been better.  I used a box cutter. Do that at your own risk. I have cut myself badly in the past trying to whittle plastic, so don't use the drive cover if you don't want to.  It just supports the drive better than sliding the bare drive onto the connector and letting it dangle.

After the adjustments I slid the drive into the the Seagate Thuderbolt "tray" adapter and hooked it up to the Thunderbolt on my MacBook.

I formatted the drive as indicated by Apple, and am proceeding to copy from the  old Time Machine Backup from my WD My Passport drive to the new drive following these instructions also at Apple.

I'm not sure what I will do with the My Passport... keep it as a spare "archive" of Time Machine?  The "genius" at the Apple Store said I can use many drives for Time Machine.  I'll have to look into what he meant by that, other than "use the new drive for new Time Machine backups and forget about the old ones unless you need them" but I can't trust a dieing drive, so I've chosen to copy the files (more than a million so far) from the old drive to the new drive.

This will take a while... more later...

Later:  hahahahahahaha!  No wonder he gave me that advice!

I am underwhelmed.

Update:  I calculated the estimate based on the 35 MB/s USB 2.0 bottleneck of the process and came up with 7 hours.  When I went to bed, the dialog said 3 days.  Got up the next morning it was done.  Relieved to know I was right in my instinct, no way 881GB took 3 days...

Update 2: I did NOT know that you could tell Time Machine to use more than one drive and it decides which backup goes where...  Also been reading about it's limitations.

Getting old(er) Apple Powerbook to use USB 3.0 devices

I haven't tried this but think it would work fine to connect any USB 3.0 device on the market to my Macbook Pro 13" early 2011 model...

SuperSpeed USB 3.0  and Echo Express Card Thunderbolt

Contemplating it. In the meantime I continue to use this; bare drive and cases arrive today, I'll get to try it soon!

Amazon link to Portable Thunderbolt Adapter from Seagate