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Hi, So I have a Late 2011 Macbook Pro 13” Unibody. I just received a Samsung 860 EVO SSD in the mail today. Was planning on upgrading tonight, but some issues have came up. I accidentally ordered the wrong SATA cable - instead of a SATA to USB, it looks like it is just a SATA to SATA. Is there any other way I can clone the HDD to the SSD without needing to order a SATA to USB cable? (I do have my important documents backed up to iCloud/iCloud Drive).After some research, I noticed under my hardware information it states: “Product: 6 Series Chipset, Link Speed: 6 Gigabit, Negotiated Link Speed: 3 Gigabit”. Will this be a problem with the 860 EVO, since the negotiated link speed is not 6 gigabit? And if so, how do I got about fixing the issue?The Optical Bay also states: Product: 6 Series Chipset, Link Speed: 6 Gigabit”, but the Negotiated Link Speed is 1.5 gigabit. Is it possible to get this up to 6 as well? Maybe put the SSD there, while the HDD is in, then clone it over, and swap the SSD to the original HDD spot?Finally, I’m currently running El Capitan 10.11.6 for a while now, and recently been having a lot of issues lately (hence the SSD upgrade). Once the new SSD is all good to go, I plan on switching to Sierra or High Sierra, but can’t really do much updating now due to all the issues i have been happening. Is there a different way I shoudl go about doing that? I’m rather new to all of this so it has been a little overwhelming. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
1 - Sadly you’ll need to wait until you get the SATA to USB adapter cable. Here’s the one I use StarTech 2.5" SATA to USB adapter cable 2 - Yes! Your system has a SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) HDD and the HD SATA cable is not rated for SATA III (6.0 Gb/s). You need to get the better cable MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable And, yes this is the 2012 version as it is the first one that Apple offered a SATA III drive. In addition I strongly recommend you place a strip of electricians tape on the uppercase where the cable crosses over to help protect the cable from the rough surface of the uppercase. The last issue is how you fold the cable around the corners. You don’t want a sharp fold you want an arc so the thin wires within the cable are not damaged. I use a Bic pen ink straw or you could use a bamboo skewer to help shape the radius. You really need to wait until you get the proper HD SATA cable before you move forward. 3 - The optical drive rate of data is very slow in comparison to a HDD or SSD! As such you won’t find a CD/DVD drive going any faster. Some BluRay drives do go at 3.0 Gb/s But that’s not what we have here. The key is the systems ports data rate and the ability of the data cable to it is able to run at the speed of the device. Basically, nothing to worry about here. 4 - Yes! You want to stick with Sierra as the highest OS version. High Sierra intro’ed a new file system from HFS+ to APFS. SATA based SSD systems have issues with the newer file system. Which is why you want to stick with Sierra. As for upgrading you want to setup a USB Thumb drive at this point following this guide How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive. Download the installer and then setup the USB drive first formatting it to GUID and then install the OS as explained. That way you can do a migration of your user accounts, Apps & Data. Here’s a good write up on how to use it effectively How to use Migration Assistant to move a user account to another Mac. Here we’ll use the SATA to USB cable with your old drive.
An 860 evo or any hard drive or ssd should work fine since it’s a standard sata interface. Also the 2011 MacBook pros have sata 3 so everything should be compatible. And to clone a Mac hard drive I would get sata to USB. Also if you want to cloan the Hard drive on to the ssd use an app called Super Duper it makes it easy to transfer all of your data Hope this Helps, Ronan
