Clone mac hard drive to smaller ssd install#

In my case the laptop was using ~40GB, so I needed a ~80GB+ drive. If you are working with a desktop, or any other system where you can do a direct drive -> drive clone then you only need an external drive that holds the contents of the drive, once. Note that this isn't >twice the total capacity of the drive, but >twice the capacity of the used space. The first step was to acquire a USB (or eSATA) drive large enough to hold the contents of the drive, at least twice. Obviously you can't cram 150GB of data onto a 120GB SSD, no matter how hard you try. Now is the time to move all that stuff, if you havn't already. Often people use a small SSD for OS/apps and a large HDD for images/movies/etc).

The first thing to do is to move any and all data off the drive that you're not going to have on the SSD. This laptop has no optical drive, and only one 2.5' bay. In my case I wanted to replace the 320GB drive on a laptop with a 120GB SSD. Note that everyone's situation will be a little different, depending on how many partitions and how full the drive is.Īll the software I link to is free (at least for home use).

Clone mac hard drive to smaller ssd install#

In an ideal world you would just start with a fresh Windows install and not worry about this, but that is not always practical for everyone (in my case I'd be risking my marriage as this is my wife's laptop). But SSD prices are still high enough that most people will not be buying an SSD that is a greater capacity then the HDD it is replacing. I just ran into this situation, so I thought I'd share my solution with everyone.Īs SSD prices creep lower, more people are buying them to replace HDDs for storing their OS(es) and apps.