In the process of upgrading my Mac SSD drive (which is a whole story of its own), I've come across many different methods of doing so. At one time, I was keeping "Time Machine" backups regularly which made the whole process quick and easy; I swapped the SSD cards and restored the most recent Time Machine backup from the hard drive I was keeping the backups on. Eventually, I came across another method that I was already familiar with already but didn't think of in this particular scenario. It evolves a command line utility called "dd" ( Wikipedia ) mainly used to copy and convert files. This cloning method works on Macs, Linux, FreeBSD and any unix-based systems. You will have to be familiar with the command line interface (Terminal). Normally the command looks like this: $ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb "sudo" is necessary as we are cloning a system drive. "if" is the input file - it is the original drive we wish to clone.