OS X :: Cloning FW800 Drives With CCC Or SuperDuper
Feb 20, 2009
I have Western Digital Studio II (2x1TB, configured as 2TB). As I don't feel secure and wanted to make a backup of this HDD, I bought an identical HDD for backup.
Questions:
1) If I were to get a chance to start over, can I configure these two drives as a RAID cluster, so that whatever written on 1st disk, automatically mirrored to 2nd disk? Bear in mind, I'm using FW800 for both HDD in daisy-chained setup.
2) How reliable is RAID mirroring (software in leopard) using FW800 external drives, as it may subject to different 'connection/attachment' time to my iMac. Internal drives always on at the same time.
3) I tried to use CCC to clone the disk, the sustained speed is disappointingly at 30MB/sec read and write. If I did a copy from my internal HDD to external disk, I get easily 50-60 MB/sec.
I have been using a MBP for a few months now and I am making a total conversion from PC user to Mac user in January when I buy a nice new 24" iMac but to go with it, I want to buy a couple of new external hard drives. I have currently got a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB USB Drive which is Windows Formatted and I will be keeping that to use with my work laptop (a Dell), and I have been really pleased with its reliability. Anyway, I have been looking around and there are some fab drives on the market but I have a couple of questions. If I get an iMac with a 500GB Internal Hard Drive, how big an External hard drive will I need to use Time Machine without having to delete backups all the time?
Also, I have been primarily looking at the new Seagate FreeAgent drives and the do a PC version (USB) and a Mac version (USB/FW400/FW800), but the 640GB USB version costs �76 whereas the 500GB FW version costs �100. Would you go for the bigger size or the added benefits of FW800? Will I notice much speed difference between USB and FW800?
i'm cloning my mac hd (mac book pro, snow leopard) and though i've made successful clones, the sum of the hard drives (mac hd and external hd) don't match. for instance, my mac hd reads at: 233.71 GB, however the cloned external hd reads at: 216.54 GB. can anyone explain this discrepancy? are there certain things that don't go into the clone that are on the mac hd?
I have just bought a 1.5tb hard drive for my G5 powermac (Dual Core 2.0, pc4200 ddr2 model) and I was wondering how the best way to transfer over would be. I would be putting both drives in, but then what. Can I use the Disk utility to "restore" onto the new drive from the old? Trouble is, I can't find my Leopard discs, all I have is a Snow Leopard and a Panther retail set, so it really has to be done from inside OS X. If I were to clone using the "restore" function, what would happen in terms of a bootloader? I would put the 1.5tb in slot one then, but if I left the 250gb in there for now, would that give problems? How would it know which to boot from?
I use my iMac for my media business, however I will be on the road more this year, and so I was going to put all my files, apps etc over to my work's MacBook so I can get things done for my clients while I'm on the go. Of course the thing is all my apps, files etc are lodged in the iMac, so I thought that the only way to avoid manually reinstalling stuff (and then have to move it all back to the iMac again) was to clone the user account or drive? Is there a way that this can be done?
I recently picked up a couple of external drives, and decided to benchmark them to determine whether the interface and/or drive type made much of a difference. For those that don't want to read the details, here's the bottom line: If you're going to splurge on a FW800 interface, it's well worth fitting this with a 7200 rpm drive to maximize performance. Uncached sequential writes over FW800 were twice as fast on the 7200 rpm drive compared to the 5400 rpm. FW800 is a marked improvement over USB 2.0 as well. Full results are below. For background, when shopping for drives, I was interested in using the FW800 interface on the MBPs, for the simple reason it's rated almost twice as fast as USB 2.0. Some of the drives I was shopping for included 7200 rpm drives. My first thought was this was silly, since the interface limited the throughput to far-below the limits a 5400 rpm drive could produce, so why bother upgrading to 7200 rpm? Well, it turns out it does make a difference. I've got both a FW800 enclosure (G Drive Mini) and a USB 2.0 interface (Nexstar TX) as well as a 320GB 7200 rpm drive (Hitachi) and a 640GB 5400 rpm drive (Western Digital). So, I benchmarked both drives using both interfaces. Some interesting results! Turns out, the 7200 rpm drive does in fact dramatically improve performance in the FW800 interface. For sequential operations, Firewire has a dramatic improvement over USB 2.0; for random read/writes, drive speed seems to be a more important factor. And for large files, the combination of Firewire and 7200 rpm gives a pretty impressive throughput of almost 75MB/s. Full results are below. Note that the drive and interface are noted in the title bar for each drive.
I have a Mac Book Pro core duo with a partition running windowsXP pro. The hard drive is almost completely full. I want to replace the drive with a larger drive and clone the current drive. Is there a way to completely clone the drive complete with the partition, boot camp, windows etc? I'm running mac os 10.4.11
On my new MBP I fired and set-up the system, and SL was already installed. I followed the procedure of cloning my Leopard HD on to a local back-up drive, using CCC, plugged it in to the MBP and booted from the clone.It has booted up without any noticeable issues but when I go to open Disk Utility, or any other program on the cloned disk, I get the '...application X quit unexpectedly' dialogue box
I am trying to back up my 2 year old Mini (160GB drive, 90GB used, Core 2 Duo chip at 2.0GHz). I have used Carbon Copy Cloner but found that it is extremely slow (4+ hours) backing up my 90GB of used disk space to a disk image file on an USB hard drive.
I have searched the forum for a method of making a complete bootable clone of my hard disk. Just about every one seems to recommend CCC or Superduper!. From what I gather, after using either one of the programs, the system will boot, but no one has indicated whether all of the programs will still run. Since OS X is UNIX based, I was led to believe that programs are referenced to the original mounted disk they were installed on. Since the new disk cannot have the exact same name as any other mounted disk I will have to use a name other than Mackintosh HD to clone the original disk to the new one. I also have a concern that on my current boot disk is Windows XP running under parallels. Will these programs also copy the Windows partition (NTFS) as well?
This is my first MBA so I am wondering about a backup strategy. On my iMac I use SuperDuper! and TimeMachine. On my MacBook I just use SuperDuper! I do not backup my MacBook as often as my iMac because most of my content creation is on the iMac. I am thinking of just using the same strategy as I currently use on my MacBook. What strategies are you using?
Before I got rid of my SR MBP (2007 model) running Leopard in April, I used SuperDuper to create a clone backup on an external hard drive. Moreover, I used Time Machine to make a backup on an additional drive. When I got the MBP 2010 model (running Snow Leopard), I used migration assistant to move the stuffs originated from my SR MBP to the MBP 2010. It has been 2.5 months and things "seem" to be running fine. Is it ok to remove the backup made by Super Duper and use the drive for other purposes? (For example, clone the new MBP HD or use it to backup my PC, etc). Can you think of any situation that I should still keep the backup made by Super Duper?
I'm going to get an external drive to use with my MBP and Time Machine. I'm also going to store clone backups on an external drive that I'm going to keep away from my house. I'm planning on using SuperDuper for the clone backups. I'm going to have image backups of other Windows machines on that external drive as well. So, will I have to create a special partition for the Mac to store SuperDuper backups? Or can it save them to the same partition where I'm storing my Windows image backups?
I'm planning of sending in my white macbook to AppleCare for a few repairs regarding the white casing (cracks) but do not want to send in my Western Digital 500GB Hard Drive.
I called AppleCare and they said they prefer it when you send in the original hard drive, for whatever reason they stated. My personal reason why I don't want to send in my 500GB Hard Drive is that I have a ton of files in there that are important and don't have another 300+ hard drive lying around to back everything up. Another reason is that my Leopard Family Pack disc I purchase years ago is at my parent's house in New York and I live in California, so getting it would be a huge hassle considering it's somewhere in boxes of storage and my folks are in Venice till the 15th of June.
Look, essentially what I'm freaking out over is that I've heard many cases that when you send in your computer to applecare, its not uncommon to get a macbook back with an erased hard drive.
I just don't wanna deal with the hassle. So am looking to avoid it altogether. Doing so bytaking out my 500GB HD and popping in the original 80GB HD that the Mac came with. I thought I had Leopard in there but when I put in the 80GB HD in the Macbook and turned on the Mac, a confused faced folder came on and turned off.
I want to send in my Macbook with the 80GB HD and that HD to have Leopard on it...so I decided to do the same method I used when I transferred everything from my 80GB HD to my 500GB HD when I first purchased it.
I used SuperDuper! application, free version...but it didn't work.
I set it up to "Copy: Mac HD to Untitled" (Untitled was the name of the 80GB since I erased it when I got my 500GB HD hoping to use it for Time Machine but never did)
I tried this twice, each time taking about 2 hours to transfer and copy to the untitled HD. I tried "back up all files" & "back up user files." But after this process was done and I popped in the untitled HD into the Mac I continued to get the same confused folder face..twice.
Any help on the matter is really appreciated as I'm highly considering not even sending my Macbook in with the 500GB HD to completely avoid any possible frustation if that HD was to magically erased.
I'm looking at the specs page for the MacBook Pro and it reads this...
Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive. Choose a hard drive with a faster speed for greater performance. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability.
Basically suggesting that the HDD option has a performance advantage over the SSD, but is this the case? I always thought SSDs could read & write quicker because they use solid-state flash memory as opposed to hard disks.
I want to go with the 256GB SSD but I want to know how it ranks in speed.
I've take home an unused, unloved Power Mac G4 FW800 from work and would love to hear any anyone may have to get it running @ its optimum without forking out for a new Processor. I wont be doing any gaming on it, plan using it for Media and Design like Final Cut Express4, Photoshop and Illustator and for music and movies.
Its has a Dual 1.25Ghz Processor, 167Mhz Bus, ive installed a new ATI 9600PRO Graphic Card and bumped the RAM up to its 2GB max and have an external 500GB 7200RPM Iomega FireWire HDD. I also got a Philips 19in Wide LCD 1440x900 for cheap.
Has anyone had any luck with not using an Internal Hard Drive and using either a Drobo or external drive to run OSX? I was thinking of getting a new HD that runs FW800 or using my Drobo to creat a partition to load Mac OSX on and run the OS from an external HD.
The Reason I am even trying this, is because the Mini uses Laptop drives with less specs then my External Seagate 500GB 7200RPM with 16 MB of Cache, also 3.5" drives seem to run quicker then even the fastest 2.5" drives.
I'm looking for a mass storage option and I've got about $150 USD to spend on it... I really want to get FW800 for the speed. Anyone have a good drive to recommend? The highest I can find is a 500gb for 139.... that's just not good enough.
I have a question regarding Time Machine functionality. Here's my situation. I have two hard drives in my Pro: one that operates as a Boot drive, and one for storage. Right now I have Time Machine set up to backup my storage drive, but I was wondering if it was possible to have plug in a second external drive and use it to back up the Boot drive. I searched for a similar thread, but couldn't really find anything. Has anybody successfully done this?
I want to build Mac Mini media server connected to drobo s. I am wondering if I use the spyderhub (esata to fw800) will fw800 be fast enough to play 3d blu ray with an external blu ray player? The hub lets you connect esata to it and then use fw800 to connect to mac mini. This follows limitation of fw800 speeds though so will this bottleneck? Need to mention I am going to use bootcamp to boot windows 7 and play the 3d blu ray dvd's in windows.
I have two new G-Drives attached via FW800. One drive keeps unmounting by itself. All of a sudden, I get a screen that says "The drive has been removed, you should always make sure to eject the drive properly from the etc etc.." First time I have ever had this problem. I have tried the eSATA connection and FW connection with the same result. Regardless on how I connect the drive, linked or direct. It's brand new. Could it be bad?
On one hand, I've got an Intel X25M 160GB SSD available that could go into my MBP. On the other hand, it would replace a WD 640GB drive that I really like for the capacity. Oh I also currently have time machine running to an external FW800 drive.
I tend to use a lot of space because for my work I have to use a LOT of unique virtual machines for connecting to all of my clients. I think this alone is pushing me away from the SSD.
I am considering putting in the SSD and having my OS/apps be there. Then adding another external FW800 drive (fast one I guess) for my VMs. I would then chain my time machine drive from that.
To get my Multimedia-Data off my MBP i5 SSD I am looking for a small, 1 2,5" hdd enclosure that is FW-800 powered. I was unable to find anything in the forums nor in the buyers guide about this. Any recommendations or tests? I am looking for something well designed if possible (imho like the LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra, which has two hds (double the power comsumption) and is too big).
