I updated my 2012 MacBook Pro original HDD to an SSD about 4 years ago. I went through the process without any issues from what I remember.

My sister is now doing the same and wants me to help. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my drive. In reviewing their instructions, they say to test to see if the drive is bootable by switching the boot drive through Startup Disk in System Preferences.

Once you do that and it works, then do you just shut off the computer and switch out the drives? Or do you change the bootable disk back to Macintosh HD, shut down and then switch the drives? My current hard drive name is Macintosh SSD, so I don't know if that's what I named it when I originally cloned it or if the computer knows it's an SSD and calls it Macintosh SSD automatically when you replace the original drive.

After going through this on 3 computers, and soon to do it on the 4th, I no longer use CCC. I just back everything up on a bare HDD with a dock attached by a USB cable. I didn't want to put everything back on the SSD exactly the same and didn't mind going through the trouble of reinstalling things. So, I backed up online and to the bare drive, as well as to a spare external drive (redundant, but I didn't want to take chances), shut the machine down, made the drive transfer, booted up, and did the new system install. Since I didn't clone it, the bare drive was named whatever I wanted. Like you, I named the new drives with SSD in them.

I then just reinstalled the software and transferred over the files and cleaned up the directories.

I did the fresh install route too. My Mac had become bogged down with something running in the background, and didn't want that slowness copied to the new drive.

I have experienced this growing slowness over time on Windows machines repeatedly, but happened to my Mac as well.

I did not do the fresh install as I was not going to spend the time to do that seeing as how it is not my computer.

Question about how to check for Microsoft Office license. She is saying that Office wants to be reactivated since it is new hardware. Can she run an application and access the program off the old hard drive if she just connects the external enclosure? Or would she have to actually boot from the external drive as if that was her primary HD?

Other than that, I guess things are working fine.