27" iMac SSD Upgrade

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Mid-2010 27" iMac. i5 2.8GHz. 24GB RAM. OSX 10.9.3

Hi all,

I'm contemplating upgrading my iMac's internal HDD and adding an additional SSD drive. Before I take the plunge, I just wondered if anyone had a walkthrough for copying all of my current programs and data, before I add the new drives please? (I am no expert, so please humour me!) I do use an external NAS set up for Time Machine backups; will those backups contain EVERYTHING I need to restore my ENTIRE system, after installing the new drives? If so, what exactly are the steps to do this please?

Finally, does anyone on here have experience of installing the new drives themselves? I've read and watched endless tutorials, plan to buy one of the specific toolkits for the job and hope to give it a go...doesn't look too difficult?!

Any help, greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Neil
 
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Thanks Nick.

Sorry, I probably wasn't specific enough...I have read several of those similar guides, what I'm unsure about is if I can allocate my restore from Time Machine between my new HDD and SSD? As the SSD will probably be 500GB, it won't be large enough to handle everything on my old HDD (approx 800GB). Is there a way of allocating my applications/programs to the SSD and all my files etc to the HDD?

As I'm a bit out of my comfort zone, I just want to have every step covered, before I start!

Cheers
 
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BUMP...anybody out there who can help please???

Is anybody please able to explain if I am able to restore my entire system from my Time Machine backups and if so, am I able to aportion those files/apps, between the new SSD and my HDD please?

I want to be able to put the OS and all of my apps on the SSD and all my files on the HDD, for now. The new SSD will only be 500GB and I have around 800GB's worth of stuff on my current HDD.

Any help much appreciated. Thanks.
 

cwa107


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Neil,

There are many ways to go about doing what you want to - but if I understand the gist of your question, it seems that you want to use the most automated option, and that would be to simply restore your Time Machine backup to the new drive. Given that you have about 800GB of data and you plan to purchase a 500GB SSD, that will certainly be a problem.

You can choose to restore certain categories of data during the restore process, but that will not give you the 100% clone that I think you desire - and you're not going to be able to do it in a granular enough way to be able to pick and choose what comes back.

The easiest option would be to simply buy a more capacious SSD. Crucial sells their excellent m500 and m550 in 960GB and 1TB capacities for just under $500. That's actually quite the bargain, considering SSD prices of just a year ago would place that closer to $1000.

The other option would be to start migrating some of your less often used data over to an external drive now, before you even do the upgrade. See if you can live without having all of that data on the internal system drive and try to operate within the confines of that 500GB limit you spoke of. If you can't, then you know you need to go with a larger SSD. If the pricing doesn't agree with you, I'd imagine that by this time next year, that m500 (or m550) will be down by at least a 1/3 of the cost.
 
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Thanks for the reply.

I'm also planning to update my current HDD from 1TB to 2TB. As I'm a photographer, my HDD is full of photos; would these steps solve the problem:

- As well as my NAS setup, which I use for my Time Machine backups, I also backup manually to a separate external HD. So, deleting all of images from my iMac HDD, which would bring that down to well below 500GB.

- Get TM to do a full backup, now at the lower than 500GB level.

- Install the new drives (new 500GB SSD & replace current 1TB with 2TB drive).

- Restore from Time Machine (and the latest below 500GB backup), onto the new 500GB SSD.

- Copy all images and files from new SSD and external drives onto newly installed 2TB HDD, leaving just OS, apps and Lightroom Catalog etc on the new SSD.

As you can guess, I'm a complete novice with all this. Would the above work???

Cheers all.
 

cwa107


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Neil,

Your process should work fine. I would, however, recommend that you do a clean install of OS X and then migrate the data back from your Time Machine backup by way of the Migration Assistant (this runs automatically following a new install of OS X). To do this, you will want to create recovery media. The steps for doing so are detailed here:

How to make your own bootable OS X 10.9 Mavericks USB install drive | Ars Technica

You can do a direct clone, but I've found that performance is better with a clean install and it also ensures that your recovery partition is recreated.

Hope this helps.

Thanks - Chris.
 

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