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I went from a spinny disk to a larger SSD on my MacBook Pro. The process was roughly: 1) Hook SSD up to an external adapter. 2) Plug it in. 3) Format it.

I went from a spinny disk to a larger SSD on my MacBook Pro. The process was roughly: 1) Hook SSD up to an external adapter. 2) Plug it in. 3) Format it. 4) Use CarbonCopyCloner to clone it. 5) Shut down, swap drives, restart. At this point I had spent a couple of hours and everything worked except for TimeMachine backups. There was some commandline thing I found to fix that, but that wasn't a big deal. On a Windows machine I would have cloned the disk with dd (from a LiveCD of some Linux), then used the Disk Management thing to expand the partition once I had booted from the new drive.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
On Windows all I do is download Acronis Easy Migrate which has a free trial version. No messing with dd (often the SSD is smaller than the spinning disk anyway) or disk management. Swap drives and boot up.
- Mister_Snuggles 11y ago
  Even better! I do all of my Windows stuff in VMs these days, so I don't really know what tools there are anymore. It doesn't surprise me that there's an easy-to-use answer to this problem, especially since the problem isn't all that exotic.
neckro23 11y ago
I did this for Windows recently (upgrading from old 128GB SSD to shiny new 512GB SSD). Process was: 1) Boot into Parted Magic 2) Copy disk using Clonezilla 3) Expand NTFS partition with gparted 4) There was no step 4. The whole process was about as painless as possible. I kept waiting for something to blow up on me, but nope!
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I used to work with Medical equipment from ~2000. All kinds of proprietary file-system formats, funky disk-layouts, etc. Clonezilla was able to handle 90% of them with some tweaking. Great tool
boxidea 11y ago
I upgraded SSDs in my Mac. The process was very simple using another method as well. 1) Backup current drive to Time Machine 2) Swap drives 3) Boot with new drive 4) Restore Time Machine backup
- cgriswald 11y ago
  How are you using Time Machine? Over the network I've found it incredibly slow; and of course my network is more or less unusable during that time. It is simple when it works. However, it is not very good at communicating its status and since I've had it fail in the past, I'm never quite sure its working when it takes long pauses in updating its status.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

On Windows all I do is download Acronis Easy Migrate which has a free trial version. No messing with dd (often the SSD is smaller than the spinning disk anyway) or disk management. Swap drives and boot up.

Mister_Snuggles 11y ago
Even better! I do all of my Windows stuff in VMs these days, so I don't really know what tools there are anymore. It doesn't surprise me that there's an easy-to-use answer to this problem, especially since the problem isn't all that exotic.

neckro23 11y ago

I did this for Windows recently (upgrading from old 128GB SSD to shiny new 512GB SSD). Process was: 1) Boot into Parted Magic 2) Copy disk using Clonezilla 3) Expand NTFS partition with gparted 4) There was no step 4. The whole process was about as painless as possible. I kept waiting for something to blow up on me, but nope!

CaptSpify 11y ago
I used to work with Medical equipment from ~2000. All kinds of proprietary file-system formats, funky disk-layouts, etc. Clonezilla was able to handle 90% of them with some tweaking. Great tool

boxidea 11y ago

I upgraded SSDs in my Mac. The process was very simple using another method as well. 1) Backup current drive to Time Machine 2) Swap drives 3) Boot with new drive 4) Restore Time Machine backup

cgriswald 11y ago
How are you using Time Machine? Over the network I've found it incredibly slow; and of course my network is more or less unusable during that time. It is simple when it works. However, it is not very good at communicating its status and since I've had it fail in the past, I'm never quite sure its working when it takes long pauses in updating its status.