Mountain Lion: Clean Install or Upgrade on mid 2012 MBP?

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Hey guys, I have a new 2012 13" Macbook Pro that I purchased about a month ago. Ive been reading the forums and have found a lot of people doing a clean install of Mountain Lion as opposed to an upgrade. Do you think this is necessary for such a new machine? Should I do a clean install and use migration assistant to bring back my (small amount) of old files, or just upgrade to ML?

Also, if anyone could touch on the merits of creating a USB thumb drive bootable Mountain Lion copy it would be greatly appreciated. From what I understand, my MBP has a partition in the hard drive that works as a backup copy of the OS.
Will this OS repair partition update to ML once it is installed? Thanks for the help!
 
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As a suggestion prior to running the installer make a bootable USB thumb drive. Then run the installer. Thumb drive needs to be over 4GB. Lion Diskmaker, which is donationware, does the trick.


http://blog.gete.net/lion-diskmaker-us/
 
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I just got my MBP15 today - much to my dismay, it did not come with ML on it already. Not a huge deal, since I was planning to replace the HD anyway. In fact, before I even turned it on, I replaced the HD with an SSD and replaced the 8GB of RAM with 16GB of RAM.

I downloaded ML and made a USB flash drive boot disk - that process was painless, once I had the download (which took 3+ hours). While I was waiting for that to finish, I did a clean install of Lion on my SSD drive, by cloning the new HD that came in the MBP (now in an external enclosure for now) to the SSD. That let me boot up the new machine from the SSD. Once I had ML installed on the USB flash drive, I booted from that, and it updated the version on the SSD. Long story short, clean install, but mostly because I always start fresh (I'll do a clean install on my machine every year). After the ML install finished and I rebooted, I ran software update (which now runs through the appstore, which sucks), and it wants to update iPhoto and iMovie already. So, that's what it is doing. I'm about 25% of the way through the iPhoto download. Overall, all these downloads take forever.

As it stands right now, I have a clean install of ML on the SSD, currently being made up to date, a clean install of Lion on the original HD - which I will wipe out once I am done fooling around, and a ML bootable installer on a 32GB USB2 flash drive.

Next, I will replace the optical drive with the original 750GB 7200 drive that came in it, using the OWC Data Doubler I've got, and put the optical drive in an external enclosure, also bought from OWC.

Then I have the unenviable task of making myself at home on the new system - installing applications, reconfiguring my environment and tweaking things, setting up accounts, and finally, bringing over my user docs and stuff. This crap takes forever to do - but this should be a big upgrade from my previous machine.

Note: I had to partition my 32GB USB flash drive. Otherwise, the ML installer process somehow takes up the whole drive with a single 4.XGB volume, causing an effective loss of the other 27.XGB.
 

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