This could take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, depending on how much you have stored on your hard drive.

Then choose Backup All Files, and click Copy Now. If you gave it a new name in Disk Utility, it'll show up as such. Next, launch SuperDuper, and set it to clone your Mac's hard drive to the SSD. This will format the drive and prep it for the next step. No need to change any settings, unless you'd like to give it a new name. Then, click the Erase button at the top of the window and then click Erase. Once it's connected, launch Disk Utility (searchable through Spotlight), and select the SSD from the left sidebar. Start by connecting the SSD to your computer with a dock or cable.

Torx head screwdriver for disassembling the hard drive.

A 2.5-inch SATA SSD (I used the Samsung 850 Evo).

(I found them at my local Ace Hardware.)Īs you'll see in the video below, my colleague Sharon Profis resurrected her 2009 MacBook Pro with an SSD and agrees with me that the process is simple and straightforward. Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place. The whole procedure took less than an hour (not counting the half a day it took to clone my MacBook's hard drive to the SSD). I replaced my 2011-era MacBook Pro's 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 Evo.

And they aren't nearly as costly per gigabyte as they once were. They are more energy efficient, more reliable and quieter than hard drives with magnetic, spinning disks. There's a reason that all modern MacBooks and the vast majority of all laptops sold today use SSDs. If you have an old MacBook Pro with one foot in the grave, the single best thing you can do to breathe new life into it is replace its traditional spinning hard drive with a solid-state drive.

Macbook pro 2012 external hard drive