In part 1, I outlined the issues with using SSD drives on Mac OS X Yosemite and above and why you should not use TRIM on third party SSD drives. In part 2, I am going to share how I installed my Angelbird SSD wrk for Mac Pro drive into my Mid 2010 Mac Pro and how I followed the advice from Rich at Create Pro to create a clean install and appropriate backups.

Bring On The Angelbird SSD Drive

So over the Christmas break I choose to install my Angelbird SSD wrk for Mac Pro drive. Angelbird have a range of different SSD drives each ready to use in a different type of Mac so there is one for the MacBook Pro and another generic drive.

The Mac Pro drive comes with a piece of aluminium and instruction so that I could fit the SSD drive in one of the SATA drive caddies in my Mac Pro.

Once in my Pro Tools computer, a Mac Pro, I needed to format it but the first pleasant surprise is that it shows up in Disk Utility as an Apple drive, so to the Mac it is an Apple drive, so the Angelbird has metamorphosed into an Apple.

Clean Install From Scratch

Once formatted, I installed a clean version of the Mac OS following Rich from Create Pro's advice, rather than clone my existing boot drive. Then I installed pretty well everything from scratch. The only cheating I did was to use Apple's Migration Assistant to move across my computer and network settings, which saves alot of messing around with passwords etc. making setting up the machine alot easier as my Mac Pro is my office machine as well as my Pro Tools machine.

All through the process I left my Crucial drive intact so I could boot from that and continue working as normal - another great tip from Rich at Create Pro. And there we have it. I now have my Mac Pro booting of my Apple, sorry Angelbird SSD drive.

Clones And Backups

Next I cloned both my new Angelbird drive and my old Crucial drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner, onto two partitions of by startup backup drive so that I have a clean copy of my boot drive as well as a safety copy of my Crucial boot drive. Then I wiped the Crucial SSD drive and then set up CCC to clone my Angelbird drive and to update it everyday so that I always have a clone of my boot drive, so if there is a major problem with my boot drive I can be back up and running in a couple of minutes of the Crucial clone drive. Then I always have the clean clones to fall back onto it necessary.