Selecting the SSD
I searched for lists of best SSDs, and tried to find a consensus. I went with the Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB. For the RAM, I went with this Crucial 16 GB kit for Mac.Migrating OS X and Data
I followed the macsales instructions almost exactly with a few modifications to the order following the order in these instructions by Michael A. Prospero. I like both of these instructions because they use Mac software and not any third party software for the migration. Macsales strongly suggests installing a new copy of OS X as opposed to cloning the drive (as you can do with Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper). From my limited experience with software, their points about having a fresh install and setting up a recovery partition seem sensible to me.I made a slight adjustment to the instructions. Instead of installing the new drive right away, I am connecting it externally while my old drive is still in the computer, following the order in the "Cloning Your Hard Drive" section of Prospero's instructions. This has made it so I have to install OSX over the USB-SATA connector I got. So, I would guess it might take longer, but it seems a little safer to me. It took a little less than 2 hours.
After install (which went through the ~2 hour screen, a ~15 minute screen, and a quick final screen), it came to the welcome screen, with the first options being the usual language and keyboard selections. I chose to transfer info from mac, time machine, or start up disk. On next step, I chose transferring data from my hard drive as opposed to the time machine backup. I'll note that I didn't have a chance to run software update as mentioned in step 9. Transferring ~200 GB over USB took ~ 2 hours, I think.
