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Francois
09-26-2012, 10:11 AM
I'm about to change the Boot Disk (presently a 750 GB Samsung HD) of my old (2008) Mac Pro for a 256GB SSD. As my whole system occupies 78 GB, this should be ample. But as this is my first adventure with SSD's ( on which I' have read a lot), I'd like to detail the procedure I intend to follow because it raises ( for me ) a few questions.

Basically I'll replace in its tray The Samsung by the SSD ( with a proper adapter 2.5" -> 3.5").
The Samsung will then be plugged in a "Voyager" ( Newer Technology) external box with multiple connections to the Mac (USB3 at present, eSata III, FW 800 and 400) and I'll use SuperDuper to clone this Samsung to the SSD (correctly "GUID'ed and formatted).
My 2 questions are:
1) is USB3 OK and would it be safer,at the expernse of speed, to use FW800 ?
2) iDefrag shows that the Samung volume is moderately fragmented ( except for free space of course). Am I right in thinking that defragging it first makes no sense ?

Thanks in advance for advice from the community

dnanian
09-26-2012, 03:43 PM
It's probably easiest to do a "Sandbox - shared users" from your regular drive to the SSD. That'll put the OS on the SSD, and keep everything else on the regular drive.

Francois
09-27-2012, 04:51 AM
Thanks Dave, but the original drive (the Samsung) will be removed from the system ( replaced by the SSD ).
And what do you think about USB3 vs Firewire (800 or 400) ?

dnanian
09-27-2012, 07:33 AM
Ah - then you won't be doing just an OS copy (which is what I thought you meant by "system").

You can just do a full "Backup - all files". If you write to support, I'll give you some general steps.

I'm a fan of USB3. Not so much USB2, but USB3 is good.