Cloning a half-full 500 GB drive to a 256 GB SSD drive

optical-drivessd

Before I buy a new SSD, I wanted to see if the following is possible:

I have a 500 GB HD in my MacBook Pro that is using only 240 gigs. Can I clone this to a 256 GB SSD drive? (My goal is to replace the boot spinning drive with an SSD drive.) Then use the 500 GB HD as a second drive in the SuperDrive bay.

Can I clone to the SSD if it's in a USB enclosure as well?

And what is the best cloning software?

I'm running OS X Lion, if that's useful.

Best Answer

You can do that, however having so little space left on the SSD after cloning might be an issue when you start running the machine.

You can use either Disk Utility (in Utilities, or better, you could start from the Snow Leopard DVD and start it from there); SuperDuper! (I've used that), or Carbon Copy Cloner. But be very careful, make sure that you don't switch the source and target (you'll lose everything) and make sure that you can boot from the SSD and that everything works before deleting the old drive. Find some tutorials (SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner have them on their websites) print them and make sure that you understand each step before proceeding with the cloning.

Alternatively, if you can find or borrow another disk, you can create a Time Machine backup of the internal disk, replace it with the SSD and restore from Time Machine. It would be slower, but you'll have an extra copy (the Time Machine disk) just in case.