2 versions of the same OSX on a particianed hard drive?

[Electronic1982]

Hi all (1st post here and kind of new to the Mac world),

I have a Mac Pro with only a single 500GB hard drive on it which has OSX 10.5.4 installed. I use for music production using Pro Tools LE 7.4 with many other 3rd party plugins. I've used up about 100GB of space on my hard drive.

My 2 questions are:

1) Can I partician off my current hard drive and then clone the 100GB onto the new partician? (so now I would have 2 hard drives with the same version of OSX on my computer)

2) When I shutdown & switch the computer back on, would the Mac recognize the clone as ''another OSX'' on my computer? and I can hold down option(alt) to select which one I want to boot from?

I'm asking these 2 questions because I would like to upgrade my OSX (and everything else on it) but when I do, all my programs will become ''incompatible'' with the new OSX!, so this way I could go back in time, ''back to the way my computer used to be'' and run all my old programs as I used to if I needed something.

Thanks everyone!

 

[benwiggy]

1. You can't "resize" your current partition and keep your data on it, if you're running 10.5. You will need to copy your data to another drive, repartition the volume, and then make the duplicates. Yes, the computer will treat them as different.
However, if you are copying your files to another drive, then you've already made the copy and don't need to split your disk in the first place.

In any case: you should ALREADY have a backup. Without one, you can expect to lose your files.

2. "All your apps will become incompatible"??? If your Mac is running Leopard, then it probably can't upgrade beyond Snow Leopard. Most apps should still work, and those that don't should have updates that will make them work.
I probably wouldn't upgrade an older machine beyond 10.6 unless I strongly needed the features in the newer OS.

 

[Electronic1982]

Hi, Can I make a copy onto an external USB or Firewire Hard Drive? Will the Mac still recognise & run the OSX from the external hard drive, even though it's external?

Also, I have a 1st Gen Mac Pro 8-Core, 3Ghz (total 24Ghz), 9GB RAM (I'll also max this out). It bought it new early 2008, Would my Mac count as ''old''? I should think it's OK to get up date on it? Isn't it?

 

[benwiggy]

1. Yes, you can copy to and boot from an external drive.

2. Define "old". Is your Mac Pro still a reliable workhorse? Yes. Can it run OS X 10.9? No. You can certainly replace the internal drives easily, add RAM, and may be all sorts of other modifications. (BTW: 8-cores @ 3GHz does not 24Ghz make.)

There are plenty of sites that will show you the specs of your Macs, what you can upgrade them to, modifications you can make, etc, etc.

 

[Electronic1982]

Hi, thanks for the answers.

Also, how does the core system work on a Mac? I thought if I had 8 cores who each go at 3Ghz, then 8x3Ghz=24Ghz doesn't it? or doesn't it work like that?

 

[benwiggy]

Put simply, multi-core CPUs tend to run one process (or sub-unit called a thread) on one core and another process on another core.

You don't get one process running on all 8 cores at the same time. So the notion of anything running at 24GHz is incorrect.

You've got 8 cores at 3GHz. That's impressive in itself.

 

[Fishrrman]

Since you have a Mac Pro, my suggestion would be --

... if you want to experiment with a new(er) OS, get yourself an SSD, install it into the MacPro, and install the new OS onto the SSD.

You will be AMAZED at the speed difference with the SSD.

The Mac Pro makes doing things like this easy.

 

[Electronic1982]

Thanks for the replies,

Does anyone know the lifespan of a current SSD? Isn't it shorter than a normal Hard drive? and SSD can be overwritten much less than a normal hard drive can't it?

 

[benwiggy]

The days of counting SSD writes are over.

However: you should expect any type of storage device to fail, and be prepared for that eventuality.