Richard Baker Posted May 13, 2016 Share Posted May 13, 2016 Has anyone carried out a Mac upgrade involving the installation of an SSD plus an OSX upgrade? I'm going to bump up the performance of my ageing Mac Pro with RAM and the SSD so need a worklfow to follow from the beginning to the happy conclusion! Many thanks, Richard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted May 13, 2016 Share Posted May 13, 2016 Not an SSD but I've replaced non-SSD internal hard drives on a few occasions and just done a clean install - it depends on the age of your Mac and whether you have a DVD drive and installer disks (you can upgrade the OS after installing the original) or whether you need to download an installer (post Snow Leopard I think). If the latter, then you can create a bootable USB flash drive (I can point you to instructions) or even install a clean OS on an external hard drive, boot from that and then install on the SSD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Baker Posted May 13, 2016 Author Share Posted May 13, 2016 Thanks. Yes, I have the startup disc for the 2009 Mac Pro which has a working optical (DVD) drive. So the plan is to wipe the old HDD and copy files and apps on to that while using the SSD as a boot and OS. Richard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted May 13, 2016 Share Posted May 13, 2016 In that case just insert the SSD (I don't know where that goes in the MacPro 2009) and install an upgrade directly after starting up from the current hard drive. You will get an option of which drive you want to install on at some point early in the process. However, just a caveat about upgrading. You might find that your 2009 Mac is very slow with the later OSs. My 2008 MacPro with 16GB of RAM was extremely slow on Mavericks even. It is currently retired but I reinstalled Snow Leopard on it so I can use my old slide scanner if time ever allows. The SSD won't make a huge difference in terms of speed of processing images - certainly not raw conversions - the processor is the main control on that. In other words, depending on your needs, you might be wasting money upgrading rather than buying a new Mac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Baker Posted May 13, 2016 Author Share Posted May 13, 2016 Hmm, that's interesting. I wasn't going to upgrade to 10.10 and use that for a couple of years more. I need more OS because some apps don't work any more and I'm prepared to buy newer version (like LR and PS in that other thread of mine) and iTunes won't work at all and therefore the iPad won't backup - stuff like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted May 13, 2016 Share Posted May 13, 2016 The latest version of LR needs 64-bit OS so 10.9 (Mavericks) minimum. I think it's time to start considering a new computer when things stop working and one is wasting time waiting for things to happen. Also the RAM for the older MacPros is now very expensive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted May 13, 2016 Share Posted May 13, 2016 Has anyone carried out a Mac upgrade involving the installation of an SSD plus an OSX upgrade? I'm going to bump up the performance of my ageing Mac Pro with RAM and the SSD so need a worklfow to follow from the beginning to the happy conclusion! Many thanks, Richard. I upgraded a 4GB RAM 500GB disk 2012 MacBook Pro running Yosemite, to 8GB RAM, 1TB hybrid drive, El Capitan. It was a while ago now, but if I recall correctly I did it one step at a time, using instructions I found on the net. Step 1 - Opened the unit, upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 8GB. Closed up, checked everything still worked OK. Step 2 - Used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my 500GB internal hard-disk onto new external Seagate Momentus 1TB Hybrid drive (in a USB disk caddy) and made bootable with recovery partition. (The hybrid drive is part SSD, part conventional HDD) Step 3 - Checked I could boot from new external 1TB drive whilst connected to USB port. Step 4 - Reopened the unit, removed the internal 500GB drive and fitted the 1TB drive. Step 5 - Proved system booted and ran OK. I seem to recall it took a disconcertingly long time to boot the first time whilst it "gets accustomed to" the new drive. I used the machine like this for a while to be sure everything was OK. Step 6 - In place upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan. Again checked everything OK. Hope that helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duncan_Andison Posted May 13, 2016 Share Posted May 13, 2016 Has anyone carried out a Mac upgrade involving the installation of an SSD plus an OSX upgrade? I'm going to bump up the performance of my ageing Mac Pro with RAM and the SSD so need a worklfow to follow from the beginning to the happy conclusion! Many thanks, Richard. I upgraded a 4GB RAM 500GB disk 2012 MacBook Pro running Yosemite, to 8GB RAM, 1TB hybrid drive, El Capitan. It was a while ago now, but if I recall correctly I did it one step at a time, using instructions I found on the net. Step 1 - Opened the unit, upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 8GB. Closed up, checked everything still worked OK. Step 2 - Used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my 500GB internal hard-disk onto new external Seagate Momentus 1TB Hybrid drive (in a USB disk caddy) and made bootable with recovery partition. (The hybrid drive is part SSD, part conventional HDD) Step 3 - Checked I could boot from new external 1TB drive whilst connected to USB port. Step 4 - Reopened the unit, removed the internal 500GB drive and fitted the 1TB drive. Step 5 - Proved system booted and ran OK. I seem to recall it took a disconcertingly long time to boot the first time whilst it "gets accustomed to" the new drive. I used the machine like this for a while to be sure everything was OK. Step 6 - In place upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan. Again checked everything OK. Hope that helps. +1. This is more or less the same way I replaced an HDD with a SSD but on an iMac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted May 13, 2016 Share Posted May 13, 2016 I prefer a clean install rather than cloning to really freshen things up and I would think that might be better in Richard's case given that he is having problems with apps not working. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fotoDogue Posted May 14, 2016 Share Posted May 14, 2016 If you have an extra drive you can simply use Time Machine to back up your files and then Restore that to the new SSD. There were some issues with Time Machine and El Capitan so if you plan to upgrade to 10.11 I'd google this if you plan to format your current HD. In the past I've always moved my previous internal drives to external HD enclosures so I can access them if there's a problem. fD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Baker Posted May 17, 2016 Author Share Posted May 17, 2016 Thank you all for your contributions. I've been offline since the OP +1 hence the delay in replying. Suffice to say I've completed the upgrade and blundered through the process. The SSD is up and running and the RAM has also made the machine run very sweetly on 10.6.8, as you'd expect. But quite when or if I climb further up the OS tree with this model is another matter and thanks to MDM, I've not ventured further, even to 10.7. My only issues have been clean installing my apps which haven't always accepted serial numbers and finding the correct versions of files and folders has been a challenge but I'm getting there. So now LR 4 and PS CS3 are very fast and these are my core apps which are performing very well. Yes, I know this is a short-term fix but after 7 years, it's prolonged the life of this Mac Pro, possibly to ten years which is further than most computers! Best wishes to all, Richard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted May 17, 2016 Share Posted May 17, 2016 It might be worth installing a version of the OS that can use PSCC as you are not going to be benefitting from the increased RAM in Photoshop. The reason is that Mac versions prior to CS5 are 32 bit and can only use something like 2 GB max. Later versions are 64 bit and can use more or less unlimited RAM which can have a very significant effect on speed. Whether you will notice this or not depends on what you are doing with your images and how many you have open at any given time. For me, the upgrade to CS5 gave a major speed boost as I do a lot of panorama merges and these were incredibly slow in CS4. This has been superseded now to some extent with LR6's ability to do panorama merges. Speaking of which, there have been some very useful features added to LR since version 4. Your machine may be able to cope well with Mavericks - my MacPro was a bit older than yours I think. I may have put you off unnecessarily with a previous comment. You could create a new partition on the SSD and do a clean install of Mavericks and download a trial PSCC - LR6 on that to see how if it works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Baker Posted May 17, 2016 Author Share Posted May 17, 2016 Thanks MDM, I'll bear all of that in mind. I've not yet used PS for much (and anyway, I don't do much other than simple retouching and basic Saving Actions) but that's interesting what you say that my version can only use up to 2GB - something else I didn't know about! Richard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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