You will see a field labeled 'Home dir:' At the right end you will see a Change button. CTRL- or RIGHT-click on your user account listing in the sidebar and select Advanced Options from the context menu. Use Startup Disk preferences to set the SSD as the startup volume. After OS X has been installed boot from the SSD. If you are going to use an SSD as a boot drive together with your existing HDD as the 'data' drive, here's what you can do.Īfter installing the SSD you will need to partition and format the SSD using Disk Utility. You may find the following helpful in properly using an SSD along with a regular HDD: Otherwise, you will need to do a fresh install of OS X on the SSD, then use CCC to transfer only what files you need from the larger drive. I suggest using Carbon Copy Cloner for the task.

But you can backup the larger disk to the smaller one provided the files on the larger disk don't use as much or more space than is on the smaller drive. You cannot clone a larger disk to a smaller disk using Disk Utility.

Clone a mac drive to a smaller drive