Help! Changing stock boot drive with a new one.

[albeik]

Hi everyone,

I have the latest generation Mac Pro with the stock drive. That's the 300GB WDC drive. It seems a little slow in terms of response time and at times loud.

I have been eyeing the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive.

I could either replace the stock boot disk with the 7200.11 and use the stock disk as a scratch disk. If so, what it's the best way to move over my boot data from one disk to another? (if possible)

Or I could just use the 7200.11 to store my applications and run them from that disk. Is that as easy to just copy over the Applications to the other drive?

PS: I use my Mac Pro for Final Cut for HD (audio/video) editing and Web development (Photoshop, Textmate) and run Windows under Parallels for IE6/7/8 testing.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Use them both!

The simplest way to accomplish what you are trying to do is to go ahead and install the new drive in the next bay and make sure it is formatted in Disk Utility to HFS Extended.

Then download either Carbon Copy Cloner (fully usable free) or SuperDuper (usable with some features disabled, or like $27 to register- recommended!) and run one of them, specifying your existing drive as the source and the new drive as the destination. Then just sit back for a while and it will copy ALL data to the new drive ("clone") and finish off by making it bootable.

When all done, just go into system preferences' "Startup Disk" panel and select your new drive and restart with it being the boot drive. Then you can erase your old drive and use it for data, keep it as a backup or do what you will.

Carbon Copy Cloner: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
SuperDuper: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Good luck and enjoy the new space!

 

[sickmacdoc]

... Or I could just use the 7200.11 to store my applications and run them from that disk. Is that as easy to just copy over the Applications to the other drive?...

I forgot to mention that it is usually not a great idea to have your Applications folder on another drive as some software only looks inside the Applications folder on the boot drive when it is applying updates. Some Apple software (who know maybe all) definitely does that- the iLife apps come to mind right away.

 

[albeik]

@sickmacdoc: Fantastic!!

Could have not asked for more. Excellent forum and thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

Edit: I am going to go with the SuperDuper recommendation. Thanks again!

 

[sickmacdoc]

@sickmacdoc: Fantastic!!

Could have not asked for more. Excellent forum and thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

Edit: I am going to go with the SuperDuper recommendation. Thanks again!

Glad it helped you out! Feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions as you put the solution together.

BTW- You will love the simplicity of doing all this with SuperDuper BTW- or Carbon Copy Cloner for that matter!