Cloning a Windows 11 system

My wife's Windows 11 computer needed a new SSD. Here's a summary of what I did, the problems I encountered, and how I solved them.

Naked Security: HPE warns of impending SSD disk doom

HPE warns of impending SSD disk doom
by Danny Bradbury, 28 Nov 2019

[HP Enterprise] released a critical firmware patch for its serial-attached SCSI (SAS) SSDs, after revealing that they would permanently fail by default after 32,768 hours of operation. That’s right: assuming they’re left on all the time, three years, 270 days, and eight hours after you write your first bit to one of these drives, your records and the disk itself will become unrecoverable.

All I can say is, "d'Oh!". And if you are using one of these SSDs, get the firmware updated as soon as you're able to.

Giving an old Mac a new lease on life

Update: August 24, 2017: Added section about enabling TRIM

This weekend, I upgraded my daughter's 2011 MacBook Air with a new SSD and battery and gave it a new lease on life. Although this computer is six years old, it still has no problem handling all the tasks she uses it for: web surfing, photos, Microsoft Office, music, YouTube and other related tasks. But after all this time, the 120G SSD is getting full and the battery only lasts about an hour on a full charge. The computer was also running a pretty old version of macOS - 10.7 ("Lion") was released in 2011 and hasn't seen an update since 2012. Because of this, several other key applications, including Firefox and Chrome were also old and out of date, and were in need of upgrades.