How to upgrade SSD from HDD for my mac book pro

Question

My mac book pro(13 inch mid 2012) has become very slow and I approached apple service centre they found out my HDD has become faulty and that's the reason , my laptop is very slow.

Unfortunately HDD is expensive than SSD and SSD is much faster.But apple won't do HDD to SSD replacement while they're ready to do HDD to HDD replacement.

I bought a brand new SSD for my macbook pro and I bought a screw driver set.

Can anyone suggest me things I should be aware of while doing the following things ?

• While unpacking my laptop ( I read some static electricity will be there and can cause short circuit or do I have to drain my battery before unpacking or just switched off mac book pro is fine )
• While replacing HDD with SSD( Do I have to buy any SATA cable or SATA to IDE converter or something )
• While installing the new OS on the new SSD.( Not sure how to do this though).

Any help is appreciated

FYI: I have backed up all my data in external Hard drive and I don't want to keep the HDD anymore. Just want to put in the new SSD in place of HDD and have the OS in it and use the mac. that's all.

Answer 1

You should look at the ifixit HDD replacement guide for this model. This will show you exactly the steps you need to take, including 'unplugging' the logic board from the battery.

You may want to buy a USB to SATA connector cable. This will let you connect the new SSD to the Mac, so that you can copy the contents from the hard drive to the SSD. You need to use cloning apps: either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do this.

If you have a Time Machine backup, you may be able to restore this to the new drive by booting to Recovery (command R) and then restoring the backup.

Then swap the drives, and you can still use the HDD as a temporary external drive with the SATA cable.

Answer 2

Always install the OS and test your SSD externally before you take out a working HDD / SSD.

• Can Recovery Mode install OS X onto a blank SSD?

Then you know you have a working system before you install it internally. It’s really quite smooth and you can hold option to boot the old or the new back and forth while you test things out. If you make a bad choice migrating apps, erase the SSD and try again - maybe installing just the apps you need and hand migrate the non-cloud files and data.

Good luck - break this down so you know you’re ready before you break out the screws and pop open the Mac. Even better, you know you’ll have the cable needed to boot from the old HDD externally since you know you have all the cables right to just swap the drive.