Corsair blog

The Force Series™ 3 Notebook Upgrade Kit, or NUK, comes with a CD for use with both Mac OS® and Microsoft® Windows®.The CD provides a tutorial on how to use the Mac disk utility built in to the Mac OS. The included written instructions are very good and here we have augmented them with screen shots.

For those readers that are interested, our Windows How-To guide can be found here.

The NUK has been designed to be what I previously defined as chimple — so simple a chimp can do it. Using this kit with a Mac is in fact chimple as evidenced by the fact that I completed it easily.

The fundamentals of adding an SSD to a MacBook are the same as adding an SSD to a PC. For those users that have never replaced or upgraded a drive in their computer, you typically have three basic options. You can do a clean installation of your OS from a backup, or you can go the chimple route and simply clone your existing drive using the disk utility in the Mac OS.

With the Mac disk utility, you can make an identical copy of your existing drive thus eliminating the need for working with the OS. Once the clone is done, you remove the old drive and install the new drive. Of the three options, a clone is typically the most simple and fastest way to add a new drive to your machine and get it running. And here's how you do it.

The first step is to connect the Apricorn USB adapter to the SSD. Then, connect the other end of the Apricorn adapter to an open USB port on your machine. Initially, your SSD may indicate that it is not initialized. This is not an issue and the software will see the SSD without initializing it. Select Ignore:

Next, insert the software CD into your machine and open the Macintosh Read Me.rtf file. Here, you’ll see the written instructions:

The first step is to open the Disk Utility (located in Applications > Utilities). Once, this utility is open, click on the main hard drive that contains your Mac OS:

Once this drive is selected, click the Restore tab:

After you have selected restore, you'll need to drag your main hard drive into the Source field. Then, drag your Apricorn connected SSD into the Destintion field. Then, select the Restore button circled in red below to begin the procedure:

At this point, you may be prompted for a password. If your system is password protected, enter the password. If you do not have a password, leave this field blank and continue.You'll be asked to verify the operation so you'll need to select the Erase option so that the SSD can be prepared for the clone:

You will also be asked if you want to use the Time Machine option from the Disk Utilities. For this type of cloning operation, I selected "Don't Use":

You will see a progress bar in the lower right corner. Once the clone is complete, you can power down your system, remove the old hard drive, install the SSD, and then prepare yourself for blazing drive speed:

If you would like to see a separate how-to on removing and replacing the drive in a MacBook, we have one here.

*** No chimpanzees were harmed during the creation of this blog ***