An SSD and the need for speed

The need for speed and SSD

On account of the fact that I can’t really open up the iMac to do any work on it due to having the AppleCare set up to work for the iMac, I have had to have a look at another way of being able to use an SSD. Fortunately with my iMac I have a thunderbolt port not being used and because thunderbolt is so fast it is a perfect way to set up a SSD drive. It took a wait of two and a half weeks to get the Thunderbolt adapter sent to me from England and it also took some time for the cable to arrive from Italy. The SSD drive I ordered from Crucial and it arrived very quickly, so I ended up having it sitting in a drawer for a week or two! Naturally, as soon as I got the stuff I was keen to set it up and get running with this new thunderbolt Connected SSD.

 

Fitting a gallon until a quart pot

The SSD drive is only 250 GB and I have to get the system onto that and then use the 1 TB drive that I was using for everything for hosting the data. The hard part is cloning the system from the old drive to the new drive and making sure that I get all of it so that it works properly. Of course I made sure that I have backups of all of the data before I started any of this.

I did wonder if I could use the Apple Migration Assistant application to do the job for me. I did give it a try but I wasn’t able to work out how to do that. I used an application called SuperDuper to do my main backups to a separate drive and I thought that I would be able to use this to do a clone of just the system. That didn’t work out as SuperDuper isn’t quite as configurable as I thought. So I downloaded a trial version of Carbon Copy Cloner and that was much more useful. At the moment I am in the process of using the Seagate GoFlex connected by the Thunderbolt cable, getting it to start up from the SSD drive and it is taking a long time to copy the data across from the backup. I did an erase and reformat of the 1 TB drive so that I can have a clean drive without any system on it.

It is all a bit weird!

At the moment I have applications which are not starting up properly. I tried to use Skype and it didn’t work, also nothing in system preferences is working either. On account of the fact that I have data being transferred from the backup disk to the 1 TB drive I can’t do a reboot and try to get things working again. When this next lot of data has been moved I will do a reboot and try again. I am also tempted to have another try at using the migration assistant.

Now that I am nearly 200 GB into moving the data of nearly 700 GB, it is reporting that it will take another five hours. This is going from one mechanical drive to another and that is why it is taking so long. It is really quite frustrating having my Mac in front of me and not being to use it. At least I am still able to use my Amazing iPad and of course I also have my Samsung galaxy S3.

Light at the end of the tunnel

The previous paragraphs were all about the frustrations of doing the job and setting it up afterwards where there were some inconsistencies. It is now a couple of days later and I am actually using the computer and it is all working very nicely indeed. I seem to have got used to the speed of using an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive and I probably won’t notice any difference unless I go back to working with a computer booting off a mechanical hard drive. And so, how I am pretty sure that I am getting a fairly good speed increase and I’m able to make Final Cut Pro and DragonDictate work faster by using the SSD drive as by working drive.