New SSD in MBP with upgrade to Mountain Lion - Clean install???

Researched this quite a bit, but haven't seen advice on my specific question:

I want to purchase an SSD (Crucial 512GB for $400 on Amazon) and put it into my early 2010 MBP 13". It will be my only drive, as I don't want to convert my optical bay to handle the existing HHD.

I use Time Machine to back everything up to an external drive. I'm confident I could install the new SSD and "recover" from Time Machine to have everything be just as it is now. However, I don't want to do this, exactly. Specifically, I would like to upgrade to Mountain Lion at the same time as I install the new SSD.

I'm an old PC guy, so my mind is screaming "CLEAN INSTALL!!!". Is this a concern on the MBP? If so, what's the best way to go about installing the new Mountain Lion OS and then recovering from Time Machine to have everything else the same?

Or do I just do the Time Machine recovery to the SSD, and then upgrade to Mountain Lion?

Sorry for any glaring Mac ignorance, and thank in advance for any assistance.

first install your ssd.
then install mountain lion.
upon first boot up, mountain lion should ask you to transfer your personal files and apps. select time machine.
lastly restore personal files and apps from time machine.

http://support.apple.c​om/kb/HT1427
check out: Migrating a Time Machine backup to a new Mac

I'll definitely check out that link - thank you for sharing that!

What are the options for getting Mountain Lion? If I'm installing fresh on the new SSD, how do I get it? I was thinking it was download only... Can you download it, burn it to disk (or thumb drive), and then install from that?

good question. not sure, but i found this with a quick google search. looks easy if you know your way around OSX and burning images.

http://eggfreckles.net …ling-mountain-lion-clean/

and cnet:
http://reviews.cnet.co​m …-os-x-10.8-mountain-lion/

Man, you're awesome! Thanks so much for the help

imjason wrote in post #14760378
first install your ssd.
then install mountain lion.
upon first boot up, mountain lion should ask you to transfer your personal files and apps. select time machine.
lastly restore personal files and apps from time machine.

http://support.apple.c​om/kb/HT1427
check out: Migrating a Time Machine backup to a new Mac

Exactly how I have done it every year for the last few regardless of the Mac OS the laptop was running. Youll love that M4 512GB, thats what I put in mine! Upgrade that memory to 8GB too!

ML should be available for purchase and download starting tomorrow.

My advice is to clone your old drive to the new SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner, then verify the SSD boots, THEN install the ML update to the SSD. This leaves your original HD as is, just in case...

Not best idea Tony I did exactly that, but Apple managed to scr**w up Freebsd enough, that it's basically impossible to move everything this way, and have full benefit of SSD.
Main problem is, that original system disk is mounted to / under OSX (even when system is booted from new, cloned SSD). This means all libraries, user stuff, and other things are still taken from old disk and not from SSD. Normally with (almost) all Unix systems you have /etc/fstab file where you define which disk gets mounted and where it mounts. In OSX, this is gone, and only god knows where this info is written down. I went exactly same way as you suggested (on Mac Pro), but after week I decided to do clean install, since there was no way to convince machine to mount new (and cloned) SSD drive to / and mount original system drive somewhere else.

I've done this dozens of times and have never had the problem you describe.

Thing is, you don't really see it as problem, as long as you don't start look closer to all this. I'm not saying it doesn't work. In fact, everything works just fine. Only "problem" is, that original system disk (which is in such case "slow" hdd), is still used for many (system related) things, so you don't get full benefit of ssd, and this is something which is not all that easily to find out

Yea, from my experience its always best to clean install then restore from Time Machine.

Already have 8GB RAM (Kingston) installed.

Any thoughts on how well this setup would handle TIFF files in CS5? It's got a 2.x GHZ core 2 duo processor. Currently pretty slow editing CR2 and TIFF files (from the 7D)...

primoz wrote in post #14772063
Thing is, you don't really see it as problem, as long as you don't start look closer to all this. I'm not saying it doesn't work. In fact, everything works just fine. Only "problem" is, that original system disk (which is in such case "slow" hdd), is still used for many (system related) things, so you don't get full benefit of ssd, and this is something which is not all that easily to find out

How can that be though if your original HDD is not in the computer any more?

I made a clone of my HDD onto my new SSD in snow leopard with disk utility, then upgraded the SSD clone to Lion after it was up and running and backed up to my time machine drive, and now my HDD is sitting in a box in my closet, and I have had no problems at all?

Sure a clean install is definitely what I would have done for windows (and did when upgrading my bootcamp volume from vista to win 7), but I read a lot of articles online that seemed to indicate as Tony said that cloneing was the way to go for OSX.

ben_r_ wrote in post #14774162
Yea, from my experience its always best to clean install then restore from Time Machine.

This isn't necessarily true if you keep a tidy computer. If you have issues with your existing setup just don't migrate the settings folder which houses your library and preference settings.

The operating system deletes old system files it won't use again, and replaces ones it will. So technically theres no difference, migrating applications and data just moves them into the respective -/applications or -/documents etc. The exact same as if you re-download or copy items across.