Updating my MacBook Pro from HDD to Crucial m4 SSD using Time Machine and Mac OS X Lion

Finally I upgraded my Mid 2010 MacBook Pro with a nice Crucial m4 SSD with 512GB. I was thinking about changing my hard drive for month but now the price dropped from 600 to 400 EUR and I went for it.

It took a little while to collect relevant informations so I want to share a workflow:

  1. Backup your complete system with time machine!
  2. Swap your drives (ifixit.com) without touching your battery.
  3. Check if your SSD runs the newest firmware and upgrade if necessary.
  4. Boot from your OS X Lion recovery partition (hold ALT key on Mac startup).
  5. Use the disk utility to restore from time machine.
  6. Go outside or hang out with friends or family!
  7. Enable trim support in OS X Lion for your SSD.

Done.

Since a couple of days it really makes fun using my MacBook Pro again. It dropped packaging time for a 1,5 GB big IPA file with ADT from 12 to almost 6 minutes. This is a huge benefit, so if you’re still using normal HDDs for daily work I recommend switching to SSD as soon as possible!

UPDATE – added xbench results:

Name Score Detail
System Info    
  Xbench Version   1.3
  System Version   10.7.4 (11E53)
  Physical RAM   8192 MB
  Model   MacBookPro6,2
  Drive Type   M4-CT512M4SSD2
Disk Test 409.65  
Sequential 253.88  
  Uncached Write 405.78 249.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write 324.52 183.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read 128.80 37.69 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read 408.86 205.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 1060.10  
  Uncached Write 1452.92 153.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write 608.33 194.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read 2231.07 15.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read 1007.15 186.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]

2 thoughts on “Updating my MacBook Pro from HDD to Crucial m4 SSD using Time Machine and Mac OS X Lion”

  1. Restored Time Machine backups are seldom my friend…why not just clone the HD with CCC in half the time and be done.

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