Series 5 NP550P7C-T01US 17.3-Inch Deal

R. Esperanzate (Jersey City, NJ): I decided to reload my MBP from scratch rather than cloning. I had about 350GB of data on my old drive, so cloning wasn't really an option. I went with a smaller SSD to save a few dollars. I started by making a backup of my original drive onto an external 500GB FW800 drive. Once the backup was complete I installed the Samsung 840 Pro to the internal HDD location.

Mike B "mbicknc": I made a USB drive with the Mountain Lion install software on it. I booted to the USB install drive and used disk utility to format the Samsung 840 Pro. No issues at all with the system recognizing the drive. After formatting the drive I loaded a fresh copy of Mountain Lion. I spent several hours reloading my apps to the Samsung 840 Pro. I also copied my documents back onto the Samsung 840 Pro. I will copy some of the larger files from the original drive onto the 2nd HDD once the data doubler arrives. I'll use the cloned copy to copy those files after I reformat the old internal HDD. I still have about 100GB remaining after a fresh reload and putting some of my documents onto the SSD.

Michael B. : The drive has only been in for a few hours, so it is still early. The good news is there were no technical hiccups at all. The swap went as smoothly as replacing with a regular HDD. I've seen some issues reported with trying to install a SSD into the data doubler depending on the SATA controller on your MBP. Mine shows 6GB for both, so I may have been fine either way, but decided to go with the method that seems to have the most success. Stay tuned.... I'll update as I get some time in with the drive.