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Apple Computing Products:
macOS - Operating System
SSD Swap needed, will this plan work?
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<blockquote data-quote="MacInWin" data-source="post: 1548142"><p>It's been a journey, but I thought I should update with what has transpired since I started on this plan. As I had said, I got a new SSD from Crucial, installed it and made it the boot drive. The difference in space used was caused by the fact that I back up the drive daily, but exclude the virtual machine images from that backup and only back them up once a week. So my restore restored the daily files, but not the weekly ones. When I restored the weeklies, the disk utilization got back to closer to what I expected.</p><p></p><p>The next step was to transition my spinning drive in the optical bay to an SSD. I shipped the OWC SSD to them to have them update the firmware, got it back in about a week. (Fantastic service from them, as usual. Despite the problems with the firmware updater, they remain on my short list of trusted providers.) I connected the SSD to a USB universal drive connector and started to clone it with Carbon Copy Cloner. I realized fairly quickly that it was going to be a very slow process over the USB2 connection so I killed it and reformatted the SSD to an empty state. </p><p></p><p>I then replaced the spinning drive with the SSD and tried to boot, thinking that I would do the restore from my daily CCC clone that is on a faster FW800 connection. Boot went well, but I couldn't log in because my configuration had my user data all on the spinning drive. I had moved my user account to the spinner when I moved the HD to the optical bay so that all I had the OS on the SSD was the OS, and all my data on the spinner. Now that configuration bit me in the butt by not allowing me to boot into my account. </p><p></p><p>So I put the spinner back in and thought about it for a while. I couldn't figure out a way around the login issue, so I paid the price in time and did a CCC copy of the HD to the SSD. I took advantage of the Daylight savings change to get an "extra" hour and let the process run overnight. It took 20 hours to move the data, but I finally ended up with the data on the SSD.</p><p></p><p>I then installed the SSD into the optical bay again, but then faced another problem: I had named the SSD "SSD HD" to be separate from the "Macintosh HD" of the spinner. When I put it back in, I realized it probably wouldn't let me log in because of the name change, and even if it did I was worried about all the issues that could result from changing the name of the drive after logging in, so I tried booting from the Recovery HD partition. There were no utilities that would let me just rename the drive unless I wanted to reformat or repartition, neither of which was attractive as both would then force another restoration. Even at FW800 speeds, it was going to be several hours to complete that restoration!</p><p></p><p>I remembered I had created an emergency user who had admin privileges but nothing else, and that I had NOT moved that user to the spinner when it was in, so I logged into that account, used Finder to rename the data SSD to "Macintosh HD" and then logged out and rebooted. </p><p></p><p>That worked! I now have two SSDs internally, one named Macintosh SSD that is the boot drive and one named Macintosh HD which is the data drive. What I have noticed most about the setup is that it is really, really quiet. Nothing mechanical except the fans. And as one might expect, the system is really fast, startlingly so in some cases. It's basically a great big 17" MacBookAir!</p><p></p><p>So, for anyone considering this kind of migration, it's possible to do it, and it makes for a very fast machine! In retrospect, I may have been able to save some time by installing the data SSD, booting as the admin only account, partitioning and formatting it and copying from the CCC clone to the data SSD using the FW800 connections. If that worked, I would have saved 15 or so hours of the time it took to clone over USB2, but I don't know if the permissions and ownership of any of the cloned files would have changed because the copy was done under a different account. In any event, the result is, to me, fantastic and worth the time investment.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="MacInWin, post: 1548142"] It's been a journey, but I thought I should update with what has transpired since I started on this plan. As I had said, I got a new SSD from Crucial, installed it and made it the boot drive. The difference in space used was caused by the fact that I back up the drive daily, but exclude the virtual machine images from that backup and only back them up once a week. So my restore restored the daily files, but not the weekly ones. When I restored the weeklies, the disk utilization got back to closer to what I expected. The next step was to transition my spinning drive in the optical bay to an SSD. I shipped the OWC SSD to them to have them update the firmware, got it back in about a week. (Fantastic service from them, as usual. Despite the problems with the firmware updater, they remain on my short list of trusted providers.) I connected the SSD to a USB universal drive connector and started to clone it with Carbon Copy Cloner. I realized fairly quickly that it was going to be a very slow process over the USB2 connection so I killed it and reformatted the SSD to an empty state. I then replaced the spinning drive with the SSD and tried to boot, thinking that I would do the restore from my daily CCC clone that is on a faster FW800 connection. Boot went well, but I couldn't log in because my configuration had my user data all on the spinning drive. I had moved my user account to the spinner when I moved the HD to the optical bay so that all I had the OS on the SSD was the OS, and all my data on the spinner. Now that configuration bit me in the butt by not allowing me to boot into my account. So I put the spinner back in and thought about it for a while. I couldn't figure out a way around the login issue, so I paid the price in time and did a CCC copy of the HD to the SSD. I took advantage of the Daylight savings change to get an "extra" hour and let the process run overnight. It took 20 hours to move the data, but I finally ended up with the data on the SSD. I then installed the SSD into the optical bay again, but then faced another problem: I had named the SSD "SSD HD" to be separate from the "Macintosh HD" of the spinner. When I put it back in, I realized it probably wouldn't let me log in because of the name change, and even if it did I was worried about all the issues that could result from changing the name of the drive after logging in, so I tried booting from the Recovery HD partition. There were no utilities that would let me just rename the drive unless I wanted to reformat or repartition, neither of which was attractive as both would then force another restoration. Even at FW800 speeds, it was going to be several hours to complete that restoration! I remembered I had created an emergency user who had admin privileges but nothing else, and that I had NOT moved that user to the spinner when it was in, so I logged into that account, used Finder to rename the data SSD to "Macintosh HD" and then logged out and rebooted. That worked! I now have two SSDs internally, one named Macintosh SSD that is the boot drive and one named Macintosh HD which is the data drive. What I have noticed most about the setup is that it is really, really quiet. Nothing mechanical except the fans. And as one might expect, the system is really fast, startlingly so in some cases. It's basically a great big 17" MacBookAir! So, for anyone considering this kind of migration, it's possible to do it, and it makes for a very fast machine! In retrospect, I may have been able to save some time by installing the data SSD, booting as the admin only account, partitioning and formatting it and copying from the CCC clone to the data SSD using the FW800 connections. If that worked, I would have saved 15 or so hours of the time it took to clone over USB2, but I don't know if the permissions and ownership of any of the cloned files would have changed because the copy was done under a different account. In any event, the result is, to me, fantastic and worth the time investment. [/QUOTE]
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SSD Swap needed, will this plan work?
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