How to switch to SSD?

Greetings.

I know how to install a disk, how to clone it, how to restore from time machine etc but i am not sure what is the best thing to do with ssd. Obvious would be to install system on it, but how, where to start?

Lets say i have 300gb worth of data on my 750gb hdd.
Then i have 200gb SSD. I want mac os with all my user settings on ssd to work with other applications on hdd (and some on ssd).

How do i put it all together?

 

When you restore from Time Machine onto the SSD you get to pick what goes onto the drive.

I just did this and left the big Databases off the SSD,Music,Movies,Photos,etc.

This way I was able to pare down to a decent size load on the SSD.

Then I moved the data over to the spinning drive and told the software where it was now.
All seems to be fine and when doing a TM Backup now it does so from all discs in the machine,pretty cool!

Does this answer your question?

It was also a good time to go through my downloads and other crap on the old drive and chuck a lot of trash I didn't ever think about having that only took up space.

Ed

 

I am theorycrafting atm since my optidrive-adapter-whatever is still on the way so i cant check what you just said right now.

So basically time machine allow you to locate half of your applications on ssd and half on hdd when you "restore"? Also you formatted your hdd, then installed fresh snow leopard on ssd, right?

 

No
When restoring the user accounts you just restore to the SSD and all is Golden.
It seems to deposit the image from the TM onto the SSD and away you go.

It did sort of freak me out when I tried it and it worked.

I did this before sticking the spinning drive in the machine at all.
Then I copied the data to the spinning drive once it was installed.
I think I just used Target disk mode to do the copy but I don't remember right now for sure.

I also set up a partition on the spinning drive the same size as the SSD and then I have Carbon Copy Cloner clone the SSD every day to the partition.
This way if the SSD takes a dive I can still boot from the clone and keep going.

 

My approach was to get the original HDD down to the size that I wanted on the SSD (moving the stuff to another drive), cloning the HDD to the SDD, then linking my user data to the HDD in the accounts on the system. I then copied back the removed files to the HDD from an external drive.

 

But my "user accounts" are 100gb more then my SSD.

My problem is that i have 300gb AFTER i move my music / documents / thrash etc. I mean my applications weightt 300gb. I cant copy it to SSD because SSD is smaller then that. i want to to leave it on hdd with some exceptions.

 

I understand.
The selection that you can restore to the SSD is more granular than just by user account so you can divide it up somewhat.

Maybe you would be better off to wait until the 2 drives are in ther together and then see what options it gives you?
You could always restore it to the spinning drive and then slide some things the other way too.

For me it turned out the bulk of my trash and other stuff I no longer needed was about 1/2 the size of my SSD so once I realized this it was easy to get it going.

It is tough to stuff 300gb of data in a 256gb bag.

 

Another way to do this is to load the OS on the SSD fresh and then use the Migration Assistant or Target Disk Mode from another machine to pick which files go where.
You could also just do this with another disk too external to the machine in question.

 

So time pass is downloadable from apps?

 

should you be able to just stick in a clean SSD, and pop in the Mac OSX disk? shouldnt that put the original factory OSX on?

 

That would be fine if they wanted to get back to factory settings, they don't. The OP wanted to simply install the SSD drive and have almost everything migrate over to that while storing some data on their 320GB hard drive (as the SSD drive was too small).

I still think the Time Machine option is the easiest. That is exactly what I did when I installed the 750GB hard drive in my MBP. I simply used Time Machine to backup my MBP onto a USB hard drive, installed the 750GB hard drive, booted from the OS X disc (I think), and restored my Time Machine backup. No having to worry about installing OS X fresh, linking information from my user account, etc.