Installing an SSD drive in a Macbook Pro

Hello All.  Thanks all for detailed replies.
I may not have read all your posts properly but today I tried to clone the SSD with my current HD in disk utilities but it wouldn't let me.  Told me to use disk utility in recovery mode -I was able to "clone" the HD.  Then proceeded to shut down my mac, switched out the HDs, then pressed start.....got the folder icon with a ? mark.  Read some other discussions regarding that so I tried the different key combos before booting up.  None worked (mac auto shuts off instead of rebooting second time after command prompts i.e. CMD +R; Shift Key; Option, NVRAM reset....). 
***A little background issue***
Luckily I had an external HD where I created a Mac OS boot drive (when I first created the external HD boot drive) I must have done something wrong cause I have no recovery disk icon in System pref -> Startup Disk (Only have the main HD drive icon).  Not to mention that doing so wiped my HD so I had to manual recover from TC.
After booting from the external HD boot drive (with the SSD installed) I made progress but was stopped at the grey screen w/ stop sign.  I back-tracked and re-installed my original Mac HD back into the MBP and have not done anything further in fear of messing it up again.
From all your comments plus my hands-on-approach, I now understand that TRIM is still enabled and needs to be off prior to hardware mods.  If I am understanding this correctly, the reason I was unable to boot whatsoever with the SSD installed is because there is no OS installed on the SSD.  Am I safe to make this assumption?
And, if so, what way should i install the OS onto the SSD?  A follow-on question is, once my SSD has an OS installed on it, I should enable TRIM, reboot MBP, then shut-down again before I install the SSD, correct?
Hopefully I made sense in a orderly fashion so someone more intelligent than me in this field can yay or nay my process.  Thanks all!

wyun0514 wrote:
...I looked at the System Info and it says TRIM is disabled.  Is that supposed to happen?  I thought one had to physically disable TRIM...
If TRIM was actually activated on your source drive, I'd expect it to be carried over but it's a good thing it didn't. TRIM is excellent to have active when using an SSD, but in Yosemite, it's blocked by design because the kext which has to be modified to make it work on third party SSD's fails the new kext-signing test that's a Yosemite security feature. You can turn it back on by disabling that security feature entirely but when you do any OS update, there's a real risk that the partition will simply refuse to boot. Read this for a detailed explanation of the risks.
You can look through this link for an explanation of what TRIM is and why it's good to have it running. It's possible to activate TRIM and, when doing any kind of OS update, turn it off and back on when it's done, but circumstances may arise where you forget or it just isn't possible and you may get burned. I did once, before the conflict was generally recognized, and it was a real pain to start over.

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