Best way to replace boot drive?

[elbirth]

Over the last half hour or so, I've heard a couple intermittent click type sounds coming from my Mac Pro... when this happens, the apps I'm accessing start beach balling for maybe 10 seconds or so and then finally go back to normal. It certainly sounds like a hard drive noise, and the fact that it causes my apps to freeze up leads me to believe it's my boot drive (I have the standard 250GB drive that came with the system as my boot drive with all my apps installed, and then I have two 1TB drives in a mirrored RAID for my home directory)

The SMART status on all 3 drives check out fine, so I don't know of a decent way to pinpoint for sure which drive it is, but I want to nip this in the bud.
Does anyone have any suggestions on if I can do anything else to check? It's only happened twice so far and it's been a while since the last time it happened, but I don't want to wait until it's too late.

Also, what's the best way to replace my boot drive without having to do a reinstall of the OS? I've never had to do this before on a Mac...

 

[ThirteenXIII]

best way to replace your boot drive is to pick up a new drive (i recommend the 640AAKS 640gb WesternDigital, really nice drive, fast and quiet)

Place it in an external case or in the macpro and do a clone of the OS / Main drive to it, using SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner

id see if you can maybe take out the raid drivees momentarily and run the system withi just the boot drive and run some apps and see if it prohibits the same issues.

if not, a drive in the raid may be failing.

 

[elbirth]

thanks, I'll check out one of those apps. I wasn't sure if there was a good built-in way of doing this or not. I wondered if Time Machine might offer a feasible solution, but I've been having issues with TM failing to write to that drive. I thought that backup drive was going bad, but maybe it leads somewhere else (I've had the TM drive unplugged for a couple days and some sluggishness had cleared up)

Like I said, the RAID holds my home folder, so to remove that would put me using a blank profile or simply making a new account to use for now, so checking that could be a slight hassle. I haven't had an issue since I posted this thread though so I have no idea when it would surface again so I know for sure.
And thanks for the drive suggestion but I think I'll go with Seagate simply because I've had good luck with those drives and the 5-year warranty is quite attractive as well. I may also go on and get a drive to replace the main one ASAP and if it turns out that it wasn't the issue, I'll toss it in an enclosure for now and have it for later

 

[Thiol]

A good built-in way is to use the restore function on Disk Utility. That is practically the same as what CCC and SuperDuper do when cloning.