This article was originally written in 2015 but it is still relevant. I have just updated it given that SSD prices have dropped dramatically in the last 3 years. Upgrading the boot drive on my Mac Mini to an SSD drive was by far the biggest speed enhancement I’ve experienced on any computer! The speed increase is incredible – almost hard to believe. Boot time went from 60 seconds to under 30 seconds, and applications launch instantly – no bouncing dock icon. In terms of bang for dollar, upgrading to an SSD drive is by far the best upgrade you can do. What we are doing.
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SDD stands for ‘Solid State Drive.’ SSD drives are the same shape and size as a traditional drive. The difference is that an SSD drive uses RAM chips instead of a spinning hard disk to store information. This makes it much, much faster. SSD drives are now reasonably cheap.
I’d suggest you upgrade your entire hard drive to SSD. Order an SSD. There have been issues in the past with SSD drives and there have been some brands not working with OSX, so make sure you get a good one.
The first place I would recommend is. I have one of their OWC Mercury SSD drives in 2 of my laptops.
They have a screen where you choose your macintosh computer, and it tells you which SSD drive is compatible. Just and you will be asked what mac you have, follow the prompts.
(I have signed up to be an affiliate of Macsales so I get a commission if you use these links.) Last check a 1TB drive was under $400. When I first wrote this article a 480G SSD drive was $1579.99!
The second place I would recommend is. If you do get a Crucial SSD you can go for the MX or BX series. I’ve also got a Samsung EVO drive running in a 2012 Macbook pro and it’s running fine. Buy a new SSD not a second hand one. They do degrade over time. Temporarily connect the new SSD Drive to your Mac. For this you will need a cable to connect your SSD drive to your USB port. They are only about $20 and they look like this: The external drive enclosures for normal hard disks should also work with an SSD.
Plug the SSD into the enclosure, and then into the Mac, and it should appear on the desktop as an ‘Untitled’ drive. Format the SSD Drive using disk utility.
After your SDD drive is plugged in you’ll need to use Disk Utility to format it – Mac OS Extended (Journaled): 4. Copy everything onto the new boot drive. Now you need to copy your entire drive onto your SSD drive. You can’t do this by hand – there are hidden files that need to be copied, so need to make what is called a ‘Clone.’ Apple’s built-in Disk Utility won’t do this so you will need an app like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper. Using, select your boot drive as the target Disk and then select ‘Backup Everything’: Click ‘Clone’ and your boot disk will be created on the SSD disk. The other option is to use. There’s a free version that will enable to clone your drive.
Select ‘Backup -all files’ to make a clone. Making a clone of you drive can take a long time – hours – so take a break! Reboot from the new SSD boot drive. Under System Preferences click Startup Drive select the SSD Drive, then restart! (wow – notice how fast it is!) 6. Swap the internal Hard disk for the SSD drive.
Now that it’s working it’s time to get rid of your old hard drive and physically replace it with the working SSD. The difficulty of this varies according to what kind of a Macintosh computer you have. I’d check out for the best instructions according to your mac model. Mac Pro Difficulty: easy – 30 seconds. For a mac pro it simply connects into the spare optical bay slot – no adapters needed, a 30 second operation – see how. I just sat the SSD drive in and added a bit of gaffe tape but there are some great adapters out there eg Macbook Difficulty: moderate – 1 hour. For a Macbook or Macbook Pro can with your old Hard Drive or order a large SSD drive and replace your old hard drive with it. You can find instructions. Mac Mini Difficulty: hard – 1/2 hr.
For a new aluminium mac mini you will need to replace one of the internal drives. This involves pulling out the fan and motherboard to get the new SSD drive in. You can get the old hard disk out without pulling out the motherboard but the SSD drives are actually ever so slightly thicker and more uniform in shape so the motherboard needs to come out to manoeuvre the SSD drive in place. There’s easy to follow instructions. IMac Difficulty: hard – 1/2 hr.
It’s quite complex to pull the iMac apart and you need a vacuum clamp to pull the glass screen off. This is easier than it sounds, but you still need to but the suction caps to do it. It requires some mechanical skill. There are good instructions and crucial have their own guide.
So how fast is it? Here’s a demo of how quickly applications launch from my new SSD drive. Check if you need to Enable TRIM. Some Hard Drives do not come with TRIM support and so you need to and run it. This will enable OS X built in TRIM support which keeps your SSD drive lean and clean. The SSD I recommend above (Crucial M4) does not need TRIM support (read article for more information).
You can turn it on anyway no problems. The OWC Mercury SSD drives do not need TRIM enabled either. STOP PRESS: There are new reports that TRIM enabler does not work with Yosemite. For more information. Time Machine If you already have a Time Machine backup, when you change Hard Drives it starts all over again and won’t recognise the old Time Machine backup. Read for info on how to get around this. Also is another very good article on this.
I also just found on keeping Time Machine working when you change the Hard Drive. If you don’t have a Time Machine backup now is a great time to start!
You can use your old Internal Drive as a backup drive. Great post, but I’m still having issues getting my computer to boot from the SSD. I bought a Samsung EVO 850 SSD (and enclosure) and connected it via USB 3.0, as opposed to opening up my mac mini 2014. The drive is all set up after running Carbon Copier and it’s even found as a bootable drive in “Startup Disk”. However, after booting up, I look at “About this Mac”, it still lists my original HDD as the boot disk. Is this right? I’m 98% sure that my computer booted off of the SSD, is there another way that I can verify that everything worked?
I am grateful for the information in this post and used it to successfully switch to an SSD drive yesterday, which has been a revelation in the newfound speed. It’s now clear my old Mac Pro is still a capable machine but the SATA drive is massively responsible for the delays and spinning ball. My only observation for the benefit of others reading this is that the cost of SSD drives have come down significantly since this article was first written, so I would suggest buying an SSD that is big enough to contain the full user data and the OS etc in one place if you can stretch that far. That should be fast and easy to manage.
I purchased a 256 gig Samsung PCI SSD that is lightening fast with read speeds of almost 2000mb/s. Most Apps now open in the blink of an eye and navigating around the finder is now instant, however anything requiring access to user data left on the old SATA like email messages is still dog slow when accessing that information. Given the amount of data in question I may end up buying a 500 gig SSD purely for user data.
Hopefully that will then keep me going for a few more years without needing a new computer. Thank you Wayne.
One point I struggled with after the install was whether or not to enable Trim, which I eventually did via the terminal in El Capitan with “sudo trimforce enable” but I had to search high and low to find information about whether this was required for my Samsung SM951. I can’t help feeling these drives should arrive with specific information. One major advantage not often mentioned about using an SSD is the dramatic reduction in noise levels. The constant disk activity on my SATA drive with not much real activity becomes pretty tedious when you are working all day long. A second bigger SSD of the same kind for the user data would have this machine running like a thoroughbred.
Hi thanks so much for this comprehensive tutorial! I did have a question though. I added a ssd to my iMac and transferred all my files over to it. I left the user files on my old drive. I also set up the startup up drive to the ssd.
But it doesn’t seem to be noticeably faster. I’m worried I did something wrong. Would it help at all to split the drives and have one open all the apps and one startup? Or even have my larger apps on the ssd and all the others on the old one? I use large programs like photoshop so I need fast processing speeds. Just one fairly substantial correction.
“The difference is that an SSD drive uses RAM chips instead of a spinning hard disk to store information.” While an SSD may contain some RAM as a buffer, that’s not what it uses to permanently store information. It uses a non-volatile memory. That can theoretically be an EEPROM, but more often NAND flash. Intel and Micron have a new form of non-volatile memory that they call “3D XPoint” (cross-point). Intel even has some modules out on the market now that are supposed to serve as some sort of link between RAM and a flash memory based SSD. Wayne, is anyone still paying attention to this article? I’m having trouble with the same thing Louis has mentioned above, but no one has answered – I’ve been accessing the data/preferences from the old User folder on the original boot drive – having to restart over and over (I put in the ssd so the machine would be quieter in my voiceover recording studio, and have to eject the original boot drive when recording so only the ssd is being used).
It worked Ok, but now it has given me the “can’t log you in because of an error” thing. It doesn’t say why, and I can’t find a way around it, except to log in as a guest and that’s going way back to beyond zero operationally. Do you have a path around this issue? Apart from that comment from Louis (which is very old) I have not heard of anyone else having this problem. Hard drives have come down in price since I wrote this article so it’s probably better just to get a 1TB hard disk nowadays. Anyway for your specific error, 1. Run disk utility and repair permissions.
If that doesn’t work try to boot into safe mode. (Shift while you reboot). Then if that doesn’t work you could try this: Or else give Apple a call on their tech support line. Is your SSD drive big enough so that all your files can fit onto it. Maybe run fully off the SSD? Hello, I just found this thread and wanted to ask a question if I may. I bought a brand new iMac in March 2018, and from the offset, it was just super slow for most application launches, even just the address book.
I had Apple Care look into it, the store I bought it did too, all telling me that there seems to be no hardware problem. We reinstalled the OSX a few times, etc. Now, I took it to a general tech expert who has already worked on my PCs, and he suggests putting in an SSD drive. I bet he is right, things will be definitely better with speed, and seeing your thread confirms this. However, I just feel like it’s crazy to have to do this with a NEW computer. Have you seen this situation before?
On top of everything, by doing this I would nullify the Apple warranty. For the price, this seems like a crazy situation. I would love to know what you think. Unfortunately traditional hard drives are rather slow especially with the larger file sizes that are being used in computers today.
Is very hard to make an assessment from what you describe but in my opinion buying a new computer today that does not have an SSD in it is a mistake. In fact you will notice what that with the latest Mac minis Apple have even taken the next step – you cannot even buy a normal SSD only a high-speed PCIe one. That really makes a traditional spinning hard drive 3 or even 4 generations old now! The speed differences are as follows (Slowest on left). Spinning Hard Drive – Fusion Drive – SSD Drive – PCIe SSD It does feel crazy to be doing this in a new computer.
But thankfully you are better off buying an iMac with a spinning hard drive and then upgrading to an SSD yourself because apple SSD is a way overpriced. Check out owc or crucial.