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Hard Drive question

B

BarneysPosse

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 15, 2008
21
0
Hi,

Right now I only have a 250gb hd in my mac pro but will be ordering a 750gb soon and a couple more down the road. But for the time being I'll just have my 250gb and the 750gb. What I want to do once I get the 750 is use it for OS X and the 250 for Windows. Would it be difficult to have everything copied over from the 250 over to the 750 and make that the boot drive? I'm sure it's a simple matter of cloning but I just thought I'd ask.


Also, I've seen a lot of 750gb hard drives on New Egg that have good reviews so I'm having trouble choosing. I don't know much about pros and cons between different hard drives.
 
BarneysPosse said:
Hi,

Right now I only have a 250gb hd in my mac pro but will be ordering a 750gb soon and a couple more down the road. But for the time being I'll just have my 250gb and the 750gb. What I want to do once I get the 750 is use it for OS X and the 250 for Windows. Would it be difficult to have everything copied over from the 250 over to the 750 and make that the boot drive? I'm sure it's a simple matter of cloning but I just thought I'd ask.

Also, I've seen a lot of 750gb hard drives on New Egg that have good reviews so I'm having trouble choosing. I don't know much about pros and cons between different hard drives.
Click to expand...

Well you didn't mention what method you are using (or want to use) for running Windows (i.e BootCamp, Parallels, Fusion, etc.) but I will just say that I understand BootCamp can only run Windows on the boot drive. There may be ways around that so somebody will fill us in I'm sure! ;)

As far as copying the contents over, yes just cloning with either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper will be fine for the OSX partitiion. If you currently have an XP/Vista partition you will need to use the free utility Winclone to move it to the new drive. That is a cool litle utility specifically written for use with BootCamp installations and can be found at: http://twocanoes.com/winclone/

While 750Gb drives are pretty similar in speed, one of the top rated in that category is the Samsung Spinpoint F1 which has a 32Mb buffer as opposed to the more common 16Mb buffers. Seagate offers a longer warranty (5 years vs. 3 years) so a lot of people use them too- I installed a 750 Samsung and a 1Tb Samsung and have been very happy with them.
 
Thanks for the reply! :)

I currently don't have a windows partition on my drive.

As for whether I want to use Boot Camp, Parallels, etc. I'm not sure yet. I've used Boot Camp and Parallels before but I was wondering once I move everything on my current hd over to my 750 if I could wipe clean the 250 and then simply pop in my Windows cd and install on to the 250 without using boot camp. I thought that might be possible considering I won't have to partition just one hard drive to run 2 operating systems. I may be completely naive but I just thought that would be great now that I'll have more than one hard drive.

But I know for sure I don't want to use Parallels or anything similar because I just want to run Windows natively.
 
You will probably have more luck posting over in the Windows on the Mac secton first off- https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/86/ but a few messages I read over there indicated that it could be done but only after you run Boot Camp to correctly prepare the 2nd drive- I don't think you will have much success just jumping to the Windows installer directly right off the bat.

Good luck with your project!
 
sickmacdoc said:
Well you didn't mention what method you are using (or want to use) for running Windows (i.e BootCamp, Parallels, Fusion, etc.) but I will just say that I understand BootCamp can only run Windows on the boot drive. There may be ways around that so somebody will fill us in I'm sure! ;)
Click to expand...

Why do you say bootcamp can only run on the bootdrive? My bootdrive is a 750 GB 3rd party drive that I cloned from my original 320 GB drive. I have bootcamp configured on my secondary 320 GB drive.
 
sickmacdoc said:
While 750Gb drives are pretty similar in speed, one of the top rated in that category is the Samsung Spinpoint F1 which has a 32Mb buffer as opposed to the more common 16Mb buffers. Seagate offers a longer warranty (5 years vs. 3 years) so a lot of people use them too- I installed a 750 Samsung and a 1Tb Samsung and have been very happy with them.
Click to expand...

I'd like to point out for the umpteenth time that cache size in hard drives means nothing.

The Spinpoint F1 isn't faster because it has a larger cache, but because it's a faster hard drive. Yes, it travels at the same rotational speed (7200 RPM), and thus has the same average rotational latency (4.16 ms), but there are other factors to consider. Areal density for one; 337 GB in the F1 if I'm remembering. I'm not sure if other drives are 4x250 or not, but I know at least some are. There are still other factors that go into it, though those are really the two big ones... areal density and rotational speed. Cache is a marketing gimmick (for hard drives, that is).

What are the odds something from your 30 GB page file is going to be in a 32 MB cache? Twice that of a 16 MB cache. But it's still only a .01% shot. It's not quite that simple, and cache hits aren't really that rare, but successive cache hits are.
 
Hey kudukudu

It sounds like you did exactly what I'm trying to do. Did you have to do anything special or crazy to get it to work?

I'm asking because I don't have my 2nd hard drive yet so I haven't had a chance to try it myself.
 
BarneysPosse said:
Hey kudukudu

It sounds like you did exactly what I'm trying to do. Did you have to do anything special or crazy to get it to work?

I'm asking because I don't have my 2nd hard drive yet so I haven't had a chance to try it myself.
Click to expand...

When I got my mac pro I am pretty sure the first thing I did was download super duper, cloned the 320GB to my 750GB and then restarted with the 750GB as my startup disk. I then installed all of the OS X updates and ran bootcamp setup, opting to create a bootcamp partition on my secondary 320GB disk.
 
If you've got two drives it's very easy to clone the original to the newer, larger disk - Disk Utility can do that for you, no need for additional software. And Boot Camp use any drive that you specify it to, whether it be the first, second, so on and so forth. My system personally has two 750 GB drives for Mac OS X, and one 500 GB drive for Windows.
 
Alright sounds like good news. Thanks guys for the replies. I'll let you all know if I run into any trouble once my new hard drive comes in.
 
When I first got my MacPro (2 years ago) it came with 500GB HD. I added 3 more (total 2TB). Now that HDs are so cheap I have the origional 500GB and 3TB in the other drives. One of my old 500 holds the backup of several hundred video files another has a copy of my Music files, Photos and ebooks the last 500 is a TimeMachine for my main drive. I think I may have over done it with my backups. I've never had a HD failure but I also never had a main computer for over 3 years. My oldest is 5 but I don't use it much and its almost always turned off and everthing has been moved to CDs ages ago.

By the way, WD Green 1TB are on sale at Microcenter for $169 and my MacPro loves them.
 
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