CCC Clone to SSD really slow

[Intenost]

I picked up a Crucial RealSSD C300 256mb for my i7 MBP and I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my current internal disk to the SSD via USB (the SSD is in an external sata USB case).

I have close to 200gb of data. I have been running the clone all night 7+ hours and it's just about through 40gb. That seems really really slow. Can anyone tell me if this makes sense? Maybe I didn't prep the SSD properly? I partitioned / formatted it as MAC OS journaled file system with GUID using disk utility. The clone is using block mode (not file mode).

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Hellhammer]

Why on earth are you cloning it?!?!?! That's the worst thing to do! You should install the OS X, not copy it! Install the old HD back (or boot from it) and make a Time Machine backup to external (or partition the HD) and then install the SSD, install OS X and migrate from TM backup

 

[Gorilla Power]

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Exactly what Hellhammer said ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

 

[sushi]

Why on earth are you cloning it?!?!?! That's the worst thing to do!

Curious. Why do you say this?

 

[Hellhammer]

Curious. Why do you say this?

OSs are not made to be copied, that's the reason they come with installer, as it customizes the OS for the computer. Installer is there for a reason, not just to annoy you. Installing OS X to empty SSD takes like 15 minutes anyway, and it's a lot safer and issue-proof than copying is

I've tried copying Windows for several times at work, as I'm lazy too, but it always end up crashing on first boot or if it manages to boot, it crashes on somewhere or is extremely slow

 

[cluthz]

Curious. Why do you say this?

Because you have different drivers, etc.

I used Migration assistant, from my firewire 800 HD it took about 45 mins copying over all my old apps.

Everything is working flawless, MS Office didn't need reautentication (which i thought it would) Adobe CS3 did work flawless too (I know, I will get CS5 soon, but it's about the cash ).
Vmware didn't boot tho. All virtual machines was intact, so I only had to pop the vmware cd in and reinstall, working flawless too now.

The Migration assist used 45 mins, reinstall vmware took 15 mins (including looking for the CD in various drawers), so a total of 1 hrs it took to get my machine up and running 100%!

A few years ago I had to use 1-2 days atl east to get everything up and running like i like it,

 

[RobbieTT]

I can understand the theory about not using clones, but many of us do so with no issues at all. I type this from my 1TB MBP which has a drive cloned from the original - no issues whatsoever.

That said SSDs can be problematic and I know PCs can suffer from format alignment issues which can really slow SSDs down. Given your issues perhaps a re-format and clean instal would be best, but if the SSD is formatted correctly I am still unsure as to why cloning to it would be so bad.

 

[Mark Booth]

When I installed my OCZ Vertex SSD in my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro last year, I removed the existing hard drive, installed the SSD, put the existing hard drive in an external Firewire 800 enclosure, booted the MacBook Pro from the external hard drive, and then used SuperDuper to clone the external hard drive to the SSD.

It worked perfect and flawlessly!

When you clone a drive like this, you are making a mirror image of the drive. It is a perfectly safe and acceptable way to make a duplicate drive that functions like the original. I done it dozens upon dozens of times with traditional hard drives and it works fine with SSD as well.

That said... While Carbon Copy Cloner is a very nice program, I much prefer SuperDuper. I had some issues with CCC but I've never had a hiccup or issue with SuperDuper.

Mark

 

[cluthz]

I thought he was cloning from his old computer to the new.
Cloning to use on same hardware is always fine, cloning the HD on you imac to your i7 MBP or from your C2D MBP to your i7 MBP would give problems

 

[Intenost]

I thought he was cloning from his old computer to the new.
Cloning to use on same hardware is always fine, cloning the HD on you imac to your i7 MBP or from your C2D MBP to your i7 MBP would give problems

Thanks all for the comments. I will be using the same hardware. I am letting it go to completion, partially for curiosity to see how long it will take. But I'm pretty sure I'll be spending the weekend doing it as a clean install with a time machine backup, to compare so I know what works best for my other 2 macs, which I'm pretty sure I'll want to upgrade to SSD at some point, if the SSD is as fast as I've heard it should be.

-Inten Ost

 

[Intenost]

Thanks all for the comments. I will be using the same hardware. I am letting it go to completion, partially for curiosity to see how long it will take. But I'm pretty sure I'll be spending the weekend doing it as a clean install with a time machine backup, to compare so I know what works best for my other 2 macs, which I'm pretty sure I'll want to upgrade to SSD at some point, if the SSD is as fast as I've heard it should be.

-Inten Ost

The clone did work, but it took more than 24 hours! That was not expected. I'm only running with the SSD for a couple of hours, but the speed increase is very noticeable, when booting, launching apps, general "snappiness" and VMWare Fusion is much faster - it launches and suspends my WinXP VM almost instantly, which is really nice.

-Inten Ost

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Pretty simple rule of thumb here folks. If your replacing a hard drive to another than cloning is the way to go . But if you are getting a new Mac than you should use Migration assistant or Time machine and worse case do it manually to move data to new machine. You really should not clone from one computer to another since drivers and such are different . Now even migration assistant can and will leave some things out but it still is the best way besides a complete reload of OS and apps. I just did this and lost some color profiles for my big Epson printer also another area to watch is fonts you may get duplicates.

Now you can use CCC to do this also but it is tricky as you pick certain things to move over. Personally i would not do this going machine to machine. I use CCC all the time but within staying with the same machine. Plus I use it for backups as well. So for a new machine Best option reload by hand all your apps and start fresh, second best option Migration assistant . Third is Time Machine and reason being is it maybe on a USB drive which takes forever.

 

[Transporteur]

OSs are not made to be copied, that's the reason they come with installer, as it customizes the OS for the computer. Installer is there for a reason, not just to annoy you. Installing OS X to empty SSD takes like 15 minutes anyway, and it's a lot safer and issue-proof than copying is

That's simply not true.

Copying a system with CCC is absolutely no problem and this is what CCC is primarily made for, creating and copying bootable system clones.

People, including myself are using this for years now to create bootable backups from their machines and there has never been a single problem.
I always clone my systems that way if I get a new system drive, no matter if it's a magnetic drive or a SSD.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

BTW This one is very important if your going from machine to new machine. With Adobe products and some others like Quark you need to deactivate the program before migrating to new machine. This is very important because of software licensing. So check all your software to see if you can deactivate first than migrate over. Office only three machines, CS$,In Design and more Adobe stuff 2 machines. So look around and see what software you have and see about moving it on to new machines without getting dinged. Calling Adobe to get activated again is not a picnic either. PITA

Need to be aware of deactivating software

 

[Guy Mancuso]

That's simply not true.

Copying a system with CCC is absolutely no problem and this is what CCC is primarily made for, creating and copying bootable system clones.

People, including myself are using this for years now to create bootable backups from their machines and there has never been a single problem.
I always clone my systems that way if I get a new system drive, no matter if it's a magnetic drive or a SSD.

I agree but you are talking between the SAME system of computer for a new computer CCC is not what you want to do , use migration assistant for that.

We really have two discussions on the same thread so we need to be careful. There are two clearly different paths machine to same machine and old machine to new machine

 

[bob5820]

That said... While Carbon Copy Cloner is a very nice program, I much prefer SuperDuper. I had some issues with CCC but I've never had a hiccup or issue with SuperDuper.

Mark

I also generally prefer SuperDuper, however CCC make it very easy to exclude certain directories from the clone. This makes it quite nice to use when you want to clone your OS and apps to the SSD but not your home directory.

 

[Transporteur]

I agree but you are talking between the SAME system of computer for a new computer CCC is not what you want to do , use migration assistant for that.

We really have two discussions on the same thread so we need to be careful. There are two clearly different paths machine to same machine and old machine to new machine

That's right. I just considered the OPs problem and CCC is absolutely appropriate for this since he only wanted to swap the drive on the same machine.

For getting a new machine I totally agree with you, the migration assistant is the way to go since simply cloning the old drive would result in missing drivers for the new hardware.

 

[matttung]

The clone did work, but it took more than 24 hours! That was not expected. I'm only running with the SSD for a couple of hours, but the speed increase is very noticeable, when booting, launching apps, general "snappiness" and VMWare Fusion is much faster - it launches and suspends my WinXP VM almost instantly, which is really nice.

-Inten Ost

24 hours?!

Woah. How big is your HDD? How 'filled' is it?

It takes around 30 minutes to backup all my things from a HDD to SSD, then around 8~10 minutes everytime after - (I use SuperDuper!)

~mtt.

 

[Intenost]

24 hours?!

Woah. How big is your HDD? How 'filled' is it?

It takes around 30 minutes to backup all my things from a HDD to SSD, then around 8~10 minutes everytime after - (I use SuperDuper!)

~mtt.

Hi, I migrated about ~200gb.

I noticed that the large files copied over quickly - like my WinXP VM which is about 70GB. The smaller files seemed to eat up most of the time and I have a lot of them. Not sure if that is a general characteristic of SSD's, or specifically the Crucial.

I'm still blown away with how fast this machine is working (new 15" i7 4GB HD matte). It was fast with the HDD, but with the SDD it is just screaming.

 

[coocooforcocoap]

Hi, I migrated about ~200gb.

I noticed that the large files copied over quickly - like my WinXP VM which is about 70GB. The smaller files seemed to eat up most of the time and I have a lot of them. Not sure if that is a general characteristic of SSD's, or specifically the Crucial.

I'm still blown away with how fast this machine is working (new 15" i7 4GB HD matte). It was fast with the HDD, but with the SDD it is just screaming.

Glad u got it fixed. I have a similar problem but with a hdd and not ssd. My parallels VM (55gb) takes forever, while everything else goes at more then 2gb per minute. So I've learned to not clone the VM (copy is faster) but sometimes I forget when working on other machines, then ouch, it's an 8 hour clone job.

Cheers,
coocoo

Ps.To those clone detractors, you are missing out on a lot in life by not using CCC (or I suppose SuperDuper). You CAN run images from other hardware without problems as well, for example, in a pinch, I will run an iMac image on an MB with no problems. There are issues with activations and the like, but that's because software vendors don't like this idea one bit (creating an image that could potentially run everywhere, on anything).

 

[NZed]

I picked up a Crucial RealSSD C300 256mb for my i7 MBP and I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my current internal disk to the SSD via USB (the SSD is in an external sata USB case).

I have close to 200gb of data. I have been running the clone all night 7+ hours and it's just about through 40gb. That seems really really slow. Can anyone tell me if this makes sense? Maybe I didn't prep the SSD properly? I partitioned / formatted it as MAC OS journaled file system with GUID using disk utility. The clone is using block mode (not file mode).

Thanks for any advice.

My flash drive has more capacity than that. lol

Thats the worst thing to do! Clone to a SSD!
CCC is for backups. Not everyday usage.

Time machine back up your files and then reinstall ASAP!

 

[hwojtek]

Because you have different drivers, etc.

B/S.
Could you please explain which drivers are "different" for a MBP running a conventional HDD and the very same MBP running off a SSD?

You are confusing block-level clone (which doesn't go in par with the SSD's cell-level efficiency) with file-level clone which is perfectly OK for a SSD. Actually, file-level clone to a SSD increases performance of an existing system more than installing a new copy of the OS and then restoring from a TM backup.
This latter method is, BTW, exactly the same what a file-level clone is. But more complicated, divided into two steps and couple of reboots.

And finally - OS X is designed to be perfectly portable between various machines, including most drivers (which are ready on the disk even if there is no supported hardware in the computer). So if the lighting strikes, you are able (and this is a supported procedure) boot the HDD from your dead Mac Pro on a regular white, non-Pro Macbook. Don't confuse people.

 

[RS2]

You are confusing block-level clone (which doesn't go in par with the SSD's cell-level efficiency) with file-level clone which is perfectly OK for a SSD. Actually, file-level clone to a SSD increases performance of an existing system more than installing a new copy of the OS and then restoring from a TM backup.

Totally agree. You should recreate the volume structure with directory files on the new SSD. If you do block-level copy you will have an exact copy including the volume structure which is specific for the HDD. Bad blocks that are mapped out and hot-files within the metadata zone are also copied to the new SSD. For best performance and to avoid problems with the file system you should always do file copy to the new SSD. The volume and all files will also be defragmented if you do file copy to the new SSD. Block-level copy is faster and OK for backups but not suitable to create a new startup volume. You should format and partition the SSD with Disk Utility and disable Erase Destination when you restore from the HDD to the SSD.

 

[walshlink]

Once you have installed a fresh OS on your SSD, you can then use CCC to clone your SSD to a .dmg (image) in case you corrupt the OS and need to restore it.

 

[walshlink]

I don't think it matters if "hot-files within the metadate zone are also copied to the new SSD"...the access time for all blocks on an SSD is the same vs. the inner/outer parts of a spinning platter(s) HDD...this is all assuming, of course, the SSD has done (or can do) garbage collection.

Totally agree. You should recreate the volume structure with directory files on the new SSD. If you do block-level copy you will have an exact copy including the volume structure which is specific for the HDD. Bad blocks that are mapped out and hot-files within the metadata zone are also copied to the new SSD. For best performance and to avoid problems with the file system you should always do file copy to the new SSD. The volume and all files will also be defragmented if you do file copy to the new SSD. Block-level copy is faster and OK for backups but not suitable to create a new startup volume. You should format and partition the SSD with Disk Utility and disable Erase Destination when you restore from the HDD to the SSD.