MacBook – Booting from an external hard disk

bootexternal-diskmacbook prossdstorage

I am about to upgrade my mid-2012 MackBook Pro with a 500 GB SSD, and use the current HDD as external storage by placing it in an appropriate case that would allow me to connect it through USB later.

Rather than backing up my whole system and data, I thought I would just do the SSD upgrade, and hookup the external hard disk later and copy over my files and projects as I need them (one of the reasons I am considering this is that I have lots of files that I may not need now, but that might be useful to keep for the future… sort of hoarding but that's just how it is…rather be careful than sorry).

my question, is there anything I should consider, before converting my current HD to external? Like file system config or something? Is it really this easy as I am picturing it or should I really think ahead of time and plan for failures to access my HD as external drive, for example, for not having read/write rights or privileges.

EDIT: In the current HDD, I only have one partition used both for OS and Data.

Best Answer

Here's what I used to do back in the day when hard drives were swappable in MacBooks (and PowerBooks before, I'm old.)

Put the SDD in an external exclosure and connect it to the Mac.
Clone the HDD to the SSD.
- Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, both are great and have generous trial versions.
- You now have a full backup AND a functional bootable drive.
Swap the HDD with the SSD.
- The HDD is in the external enclosure. You can use it as a backup, both SD and CCC let you update/sync your clone drive.
- Your Mac is now on SSD. Everything works just like before only much faster.

That's it! Enjoy!

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SSD Hardware – Understanding User/OS Level Consequences of Worn-Out SSD on MacOS

"Does it just get slower and slower running garbage collection more and more often trying to find a place to store data as the flash storage system degrades?"

^^ This is what I've seen on two occasions (Aftermarkets tho, possibly the same in Apple drives).

They didn't entirely stop working because I eventually replaced them, since things become like a Windows XP after three years of use and no maintenance.

Another SSD I remember failing did it probably from day three, when it failed to mount on a few occasions. Then it failed to mount again later the same day until it eventually never mounted again. It was under warranty and I replaced it.

The SSDs I still have (non Apple) don't show signs of shrink, probably because the space you lose is not a lot compared to the size of the drive. I'm guessing that would be the case.

Although drives tend to live 2-3 years (SSDs), I'd say be prepared for a -possible- change after 1 year.

IMac SDD+HDD – noise

Definitely make the SSD your boot/app disk and set your computer to put hard disks to sleep. But even then there are many factors that can cause the drive to spin up even. Sometimes just getting an open dial box will cause it to spin up.

I'd first make sure your HDD is not shown in the sidebar - if it is there it will definitely spin up every time you get a save or open dialog box or a finder window.

Even after doing that I still had it spinning up more than I wanted so I followed this blog post on Dae’s blog to make an apple script that will unmount or mount it so I can explicitly control when it sleeps or doesn't sleep. Incase the link dies, here is the script. It even does Growl notification:

set myVolumeLabel to "Storage HD"

tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
    set the allNotificationsList to {"Disk mounted", "Disk unmounted"}

    register as application "Disk Mounter" all notifications allNotificationsList default notifications allNotificationsList icon of application "Disk Utility.app"
end tell

tell application "Finder"
    set diskDev to do shell script "diskutil list | grep \"" & myVolumeLabel & "\" | grep -o 'disk[0-9]*' "
    if not (disk myVolumeLabel exists) then
        do shell script "diskutil mountDisk " & diskDev
        tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Disk mounted" title "Volume mounted" description "Disk “" & diskDev & "” with volume “" & myVolumeLabel & "” has been successfully mounted." application name "Disk Mounter" icon of application "Disk Utility.app"
    else
        do shell script "diskutil unmountDisk " & diskDev
        tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Disk unmounted" title "Disk unmounted" description "Disk “" & diskDev & "” with volume “" & myVolumeLabel & "” has been successfully unmounted." application name "Disk Mounter" icon of application "Disk Utility.app"
    end if
end tell

One thing to note - this unmounts ("ejects") an entire drive - not just a single partition.

Best Answer

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IMac SDD+HDD – noise

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