Dual Drive Upgrade

[GAsnr]

Hi all,

I'm upgrading my old mid-2012 Macbook Pro to include a secondary drive in place of the current optical drive.

Replacing the old battery and fan and putting in a Samsung 860 evo.

Have any of you done this before? Any advice on optimising new performance or setting it up correctly?

I plan on putting the new SSD in the current hard drive bay and putting the old hard drive in a mounting bracket in the optical bay.

 

[GAsnr]

Further, does anyone have any experience with macbook dual booting? I might consider having windows OS on one and mac OS on the other. I wonder if its worthwhile and/or possible with the age of my macbook, but running two ssd's with different OS does sound tempting.

 

[DuckToaster]

macbooks are pretty easy to work on you'll be fine. You don't need two ssd's to dual boot, you're much better off having both operating systems on the ssd and then using the larger secondary hdd for your files and other things you don't need to access instantly. Theres nothing overly special you need to do with an ssd other than enjoy the performance boost it will give you.

In terms of setting up dual boot just find a guide on how to setup boot camp and follow it and you will be fine.

 

[GAsnr]

macbooks are pretty easy to work on you'll be fine. You don't need two ssd's to dual boot, you're much better off having both operating systems on the ssd and then using the larger secondary hdd for your files and other things you don't need to access instantly. Theres nothing overly special you need to do with an ssd other than enjoy the performance boost it will give you.

In terms of setting up dual boot just find a guide on how to setup boot camp and follow it and you will be fine.

Thank you for your advice. Do I need to do anything special with the HDD in terms of partitioning so files are accessible on different OS? Or as its a seperate drive I can just access them as usual.

 

[TradeDraft]

Thank you for your advice. Do I need to do anything special with the HDD in terms of partitioning so files are accessible on different OS? Or as its a seperate drive I can just access them as usual.

The Seperate Drive will come up just like when you plug in External or USB Hard Drive

 

[GAsnr]

The Seperate Drive will come up just like when you plug in External or USB Hard Drive

Thank you both for your advice! Will let you know how it goes. Have a full wipe and new OS install then pick and choose extra from backup.

 

[GAsnr]

Success! Just running diagnostics now but all working fine. Can see the benefit already just in the startup speed.

 

[GAsnr]

All running well but have a query now, are SATA the same in both hard drive bay and optical drive bay? And will the sudden motion sensor work if I have mounted the old hard drive in the optical bay?

Have the new ssd in the hard drive bay and old hdd in the optical bay, but now thinking i'll switch them over.

 

[Melsy]

macbooks are pretty easy to work on you'll be fine. You don't need two ssd's to dual boot, you're much better off having both operating systems on the ssd and then using the larger secondary hdd for your files and other things you don't need to access instantly. Theres nothing overly special you need to do with an ssd other than enjoy the performance boost it will give you.

In terms of setting up dual boot just find a guide on how to setup boot camp and follow it and you will be fine.

20 years ago when most were running single hard drives I did what you said with a dedicated OS hard drive.
Amazed at the performance for the time. Smaller hard drive and higher speed did wonders for the OS.

 

[GAsnr]

20 years ago when most were running single hard drives I did what you said with a dedicated OS hard drive.
Amazed at the performance for the time. Smaller hard drive and higher speed did wonders for the OS.

This ssd upgrade has worked a treat. I keep my work stuff (docs etc) on his and bootup and regular programs on ssd. Amazed at speed increase

 

[Melsy]

This ssd upgrade has worked a treat. I keep my work stuff (docs etc) on his and bootup and regular programs on ssd. Amazed at speed increase

My increase was OS platter size which was smaller radius and faster.

I was however amazed at speed on a dedicated drive but these operations can be complex.
Pulling data from two drives scross front side bus I thought would be slower.
I currently have another machine I built in the same manner but some of the programs will only install on the master drive which fills it up.
The faster things change - the faster things change.
Just rebuilt 2 UPS. Ive got a phone Im going to use as a server connected to an SSD external I can RAS into.
I run some remote cameras too that record to NAS.