MBP 1,1-10,2 Options for my 13" 2011 MBP?

[TheShortTimer]

For the past week I've noticed some unusual behaviour when using my 13" 2011 MBP. Video playback is often sluggish, choppy, prone to sync issues and the files can be slow to open - even taking into account the slower access speeds of a spinner vs an SSD. Blu-rays used be flawless and now they're juddering and choppy, especially during panning shots - which is absurd for a computer with an 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, an Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU and 12GB RAM.

Repeatedly restarting the MBP made no difference to the above behaviour but I when I selected a total shut down and reboot, many of the issues (except for Blu-ray playback) were resolved. That gave me suspicions that I should investigate the status of the HDD and this is what I discovered...

The HDD is headed towards silicon heaven and I'll have to get cracking with cloning/backing up so that my data isn't taken with it. Which brings to me seeking advice about the future of this machine. It's continued viability is without doubt but at the same time I cannot help but think that now might be the time to switch over to my 13" 2012 MBP which has among many hardware superiorities, native USB 3.0, an improved GPU and on the software side, Ventura.

Anyhow, our mission statement is to keep old machines running for as long as possible and get the best out of them. An SSD would without question improve performance but I would need 3 or 4 TBs and SSD prices for that amount of storage space remain expensive. I could get a 7200RPM with that capacity for much cheaper and still enjoy good results with High Sierra. Although there are some competitively priced Chinese SDDs available - but you'd have to ensure that they possess a DRAM cache...

However, I'm of course open to suggestion because I've created this post in a bid to receive advice.

What say you, my fellow MR devotees?

 

[ToniCH]

If you indeed have a 2012 version of it then by all means switch to it! 👍

What to do with the 2011 MBP? You need to figure out if its economically viable to replace the failing drive before selling it or not. Anyways, sell it, there is no point of keeping it unless you really need it for something.

I've had so many MBP's *(as hobby items) that I have maybe 10-15+ old operational 2.5" hard drives after all the SSD upgrades. So, to replace a failing HD would cost me nothing. But, if you do not have extra drives then you need to buy one. I would think any 2nd hand spinner would be in the 5€ region and SSD's would be maybe max 10-20€ price range. So, not a huge investment to fix it in the end.

I like to use second hand Intel Pro -series SSD's when replacing drives to old machines. Most of them have plenty of life left in them and cost 5-20€'s each depending on the size and other stuff. And they usually work with old Macs.

 

[TheShortTimer]

If you indeed have a 2012 version of it then by all means switch to it! 👍

Ok, You're right. The only downside is that I'll lose access to Snow Leopard and Rosetta but I've still got other Macs which can cover that ground.

What to do with the 2011 MBP? You need to figure out if its economically viable to replace the failing drive before selling it or not. Anyways, sell it, there is no point of keeping it unless you really need it for something.

Beyond Snow Leopard compatibility? Not really.

I've had so many MBP's *(as hobby items) that I have maybe 10-15+ old operational 2.5" hard drives after all the SSD upgrades. So, to replace a failing HD would cost me nothing. But, if you do not have extra drives then you need to buy one.

There's a few spinners knocking around that were pulled during upgrades to larger/faster drives.

I would think any 2nd hand spinner would be in the 5€ region and SSD's would be maybe max 10-20€ price range. So, not a huge investment to fix it in the end.

I like to use second hand Intel Pro -series SSD's when replacing drives to old machines. Most of them have plenty of life left in them and cost 5-20€'s each depending on the size and other stuff. And they usually work with old Macs.

Alright, let me give this angle some thought. Thanks for replying.

One option would be to swap over the SSD from the 13" 2012 MBP and give it a larger drive.

 

[B S Magnet]

The HDD is headed towards silicon heaven and I'll have to get cracking with cloning/backing up so that my data isn't taken with it. Which brings to me seeking advice about the future of this machine. It's continued viability is without doubt but at the same time I cannot help but think that now might be the time to switch over to my 13" 2012 MBP which has among many hardware superiorities, native USB 3.0, an improved GPU and on the software side, Ventura.

Anyhow, our mission statement is to keep old machines running for as long as possible and get the best out of them. An SSD would without question improve performance but I would need 3 or 4 TBs and SSD prices for that amount of storage space remain expensive. I could get a 7200RPM with that capacity for much cheaper and still enjoy good results with High Sierra. Although there are some competitively priced Chinese SDDs available - but you'd have to ensure that they possess a DRAM cache...

However, I'm of course open to suggestion because I've created this post in a bid to receive advice.

What say you, my fellow MR devotees?

Well… ok… hrm…

Were it not for your use of the internal Blu-Ray drive, what came to mind was the solution I used for my early 2011 i5/2.3 for many years, from 2011 to 2022.

As soon as I got the system, I bought an ODD drive caddy kit which came with an external USB bus-powered enclosure (plastic and boring, but thin and does the job) for the OEM ODD being pulled from it.

Initially, my boot drive was a 64GB SSD (this was 2011, and that was not cheap!), and my data drive (including my /User directory) was a spinner in the ODD bay. This was what I found to be a good mix of quick on the system’s feet and economical insofar as all the data storage (I wrote my masters thesis on this exact setup).

Eventually, that 750GB spinner was upgraded to a 1GB HGST spinner, and the 64GB Patriot SSD (no idea if it had DRAM or not) was upgraded to an iRecdata 256GB non-DRAM SSD for the boot partition.

But I know you actually do use your ODD in ways I simply never did (I’ve probably burnt a dozen DVDs, tops, in all the years since), so that complicates this brainstorming a bit.

So here’s different kind of compromise: a durable, affordable DRAM cache SSD in, say, 500GB or 1TB size — like a WD Blue SSD — coupled with an off-loading of low-use data (which is ordinarily part of your 3/4TB local storage planning) to a spinner in an external enclosure, whether that enclosure uses USB 2.0, 3.0, FW800, and/or TB1.

If compact, it can get tossed in your laptop bag (if you rely on one) when low-priority, long-term local data isn’t needed. This way, you can keep your system in use for much longer (and it will, obviously, boot and launch applications at a pace as fast as SATA III can handle).


Or, well, you could go with that mid-2012 and enjoy the ancient-supported wonder that is, uh, Ventura (unless, if you’re like me, keeping a bootable partition of Snow Leopard is an absolute must.) Should it later happen the mid-2012 needs repair later, enough to take it out of use temporarily, you still have the early 2011 on standby (or even as spare parts donor for the 2012 for certain transferable components, like the display assembly or flat cables, like the notorious hard drive/IR sensor cable).

Feedback is definitely welcome.

 

[Amethyst1]

Were it not for your use of the internal Blu-Ray drive, what came to mind was the solution I used […]

There was the WD Black 2 combining a 120GB SSD with a 1TB spinner, with both drives appearing individually. A review reveals the SSD kinda sucks and a piece of software is required to unlock the spinner (once) so I wonder what OS X would make of it.

Initially, my boot drive was a 64GB SSD (this was 2011, and that was not cheap!) […]

Grumpy Old Man‘s voice: my first SSD was 32GB and cost almost 300 bucks in 2008.

[…] I would need 3 or 4 TBs and SSD prices for that amount of storage space remain expensive. I could get a 7200RPM with that capacity for much cheaper […]

I’ve just checked and all 2.5in HDDs bigger than 2TB come at a 15 mm height: would they even fit inside the MBP?

 

[B S Magnet]

There was the WD Black 2 combining a 120GB SSD with a 1TB spinner, with both drives appearing individually. A review reveals the SSD kinda sucks and a piece of software is required to unlock the spinner (once) so I wonder what OS X would make of it.

That it didn’t evolve into subsequent revisions should hint at the experimental nature of it not evolving or being as compatible as envisioned originally. At least they tried!

Grumpy Old Man‘s voice: my first SSD was 32GB and cost almost 300 bucks in 2008.

The year is 2123.

”When I was your age,” Gramps used to tell us back when we were little, “We’d have snow on the ground… both to and from school! ! And that was back when the Netherwaters was still the Netherlands and Florida was a peninsula, not an archipelago!” I think about this old, “It was harder in our day” trope, by which many elder family members partook in the tradition of light, loving ribbing, whenever I go out in the morning to scare up a fresh source of drinking water which isn’t contaminated by plastics, PFAS, alkalis, or the brain-eating amoeba which now live year-round here at 58°N latitude. In better news, community construction on the time machine is going well, but it’s only calibrated to send people to the year 1923. That might give us just enough time to undermine the petroleum problem and to knee-cap the industry from ever taking off, but it’s cutting things a bit close.”

I’ve just checked and all 2.5in HDDs bigger than 2TB come at a 15 mm height: would they even fit inside the MBP?

It’s possible a 15mm height could, feasibly, fit in the 13-inch enclosure, given how relatively low a 9.5mm form factor sits after being bracketed in. But without a 15mm example to compare against [UPDATE: I found a reference which tested the 15mm HDD form factor in their mid-2012 13-inch MBP, indicating it can fit and work, but not without some external fitment issues; they do, however, suggest 12.5mm drives will work without pushing against the bottom plate], I don’t know whether that additional height occurs beneath or above the plane of the mounting holes [update: that link hints that the mounting pegs and bracket are not used in this setup, and in this other reference, omitting the pegs and bracket made it possible to fit a 15mm HDD in their 17-inch 2011 MBP]. But if one did, as one worked up to the 15- and 17-inch form factors, I’d be much less certain.

 

[Amethyst1]

That it didn’t evolve into subsequent revisions should hint at the experimental nature of it not evolving or being as compatible as envisioned originally. At least they tried!

There was an experimental successor. (If you’ve never heard of its interface, that’s because it’s deader than a doornail. ⚰️)

[…] they do, however, suggest 12.5mm drives will work without pushing against the bottom plate] […]

The only 12.5mm HDDs I can find are 1TB so probably quite old.

[…] I could get a 7200RPM with that capacity for much cheaper and still enjoy good results with High Sierra.

The few 2TB 7200rpm 2.5inch spinners are much more expensive than a 2TB SSD AFAICS… so 5400rpm it is I‘m afraid.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I’ve just checked and all 2.5in HDDs bigger than 2TB come at a 15 mm height: would they even fit inside the MBP?

My 15" 2012 MBP has a Seagate Barracuda ST3000LM024 3TB HDD and I never had any problems installing it. The drive area is the same size as that of the 13" models, right?

The few 2TB 7200rpm 2.5inch spinners are much more expensive than a 2TB SSD AFAICS… so 5400rpm it is I‘m afraid.

Yep, the aforementioned HDD in my 15" MBP is a 5400 RPM unit.

Or, well, you could go with that mid-2012 and enjoy the ancient-supported wonder that is, uh, Ventura (unless, if you’re like me, keeping a bootable partition of Snow Leopard is an absolute must.) Should it later happen the mid-2012 needs repair later, enough to take it out of use temporarily, you still have the early 2011 on standby (or even as spare parts donor for the 2012 for certain transferable components, like the display assembly or flat cables, like the notorious hard drive/IR sensor cable).

The 2012 model doesn't support Snow Leopard but then I haven't booted into the 2011's SL partition for about two years and I have other Macs where it's still available to me - the C2D MBA, the i5 MBA (with coaxing) and a number of A1181s that need seeing to.

I'll be in a better position to decide what happens next once I've run Migration Assistant and seen what works on Ventura.

Thanks for the replies, I'll update this thread with further developments and progress. Please feel free to continue to chime in with suggestions.

 

[B S Magnet]

Please feel free to continue to chime in with suggestions.

:menacing build-up theme from the motion picture Jaws begins playing:

 

[eyoungren]

See, this is why I put some money towards NAS drives, enclosures and servers with large drives. Although not so much servers anymore.

While I do like having large boot drives, storing all my content on the network makes it available to all my Macs/PCs. And these things are on 24/7 so I'm not needing to boot up another computer or use a specific one in order to get to the stuff I want. Conveniently, that also makes large boot drives unnecessary (although I do try to get as large as I can anyway).

If the stuff you want/need is on a NAS or some other Mac that is sharing to the network you can use any Mac/device you want that's capable of handling that.

My suggestion then is a NAS or some form of larger drive shared to a network. Keep your stuff on that and pay a lower price for a lesser capacity boot SSD.

 

[Amethyst1]

If the stuff you want/need is on a NAS or some other Mac that is sharing to the network you can use any Mac/device you want that's capable of handling that.

Unless you want or need to carry loads of data with you locally, i.e. on the laptop itself.

:menacing build-up theme from the motion picture Jaws begins playing:

Totally unrelated but why does that site block my iPhone?

My 15" 2012 MBP has a Seagate Barracuda ST3000LM024 3TB HDD and I never had any problems installing it. The drive area is the same size as that of the 13" models, right?

Yup, as our Queen‘s ( ) reference indicates.

Although there are some competitively priced Chinese SDDs available - but you'd have to ensure that they possess a DRAM cache...

How competitively? For the kind of money a 4 TB or larger SSD would set you back, I‘d go for one from a reputable brand with a nice warranty. Not saying that it’s inevitably going to be like this, but there have been cases of… cheap drives lying about their true capacity and all hell breaking loose once you fill them beyond that, unsurprisingly.

 

[eyoungren]

Unless you want or need to carry loads of data with you locally, i.e. on the laptop itself.

If you're using an actual NAS, set it up to allow web access. This is how I access the NAS at work, which is 20 miles away. Set up a VPN if necessary.

If you're just sharing a drive, use port forwarding on your router and you can connect from outside. Of course, most ISPs block the SMB protocol, but most do NOT block the AFP protocol. So you'll probably want to use a Mac that can share via AFP.

This is how I was always able to access my G3 and the RAID enclosure it shared from anywhere.

 

[TheShortTimer]

:menacing build-up theme from the motion picture Jaws begins playing:

Wow!

Can this co-exist with OCLP on the same drive? Would I need to erase the SSD, install 10.6 and then re-install Ventura via OCLP?

See, this is why I put some money towards NAS drives, enclosures and servers with large drives. Although not so much servers anymore.

I've got one of these...

I much prefer its convenience of up to 5 drives in one enclosure over my previous approach of using singular units and being able to access a wider range of data than I could with an individual enclosure.

My suggestion then is a NAS or some form of larger drive shared to a network. Keep your stuff on that and pay a lower price for a lesser capacity boot SSD.

Between the above enclosure, the RAID that I acquired recently and moderately priced/sized boot SSD, I think that I'll have a decent compromise.

Unless you want or need to carry loads of data with you locally, i.e. on the laptop itself.

An important factor to consider.

Totally unrelated but why does that site block my iPhone?

It loads up on my iPhone 6.

Maybe Tony Mac is angry at you for some inexplicable reason?

Yup, as our Queen‘s ( ) reference indicates.

That's one monarch I'd accept.

How competitively? For the kind of money a 4 TB or larger SSD would set you back, I‘d go for one from a reputable brand with a nice warranty. Not saying that it’s inevitably going to be like this, but there have been cases of… cheap drives lying about their true capacity and all hell breaking loose once you fill them beyond that, unsurprisingly.

You're absolutely right. I should know better - and soon after typing that post, I came to my senses. It's really not worth risking your data (and sanity) with the extreme bargain basement options because you'll literally get what you pay for. When a friend gushed about the unbelievable prices of Temu, I tried to warn them that a USB thumb-drive will not provide the full capacity or remain viable over the long term.

2TB should be a fair compromise and I've seen a number of SSDs on Amazon by reputable brands at a decent price. I'll go with one of them.

 

[TheShortTimer]

If you're using an actual NAS, set it up to allow web access. This is how I access the NAS at work, which is 20 miles away. Set up a VPN if necessary.

If you're just sharing a drive, use port forwarding on your router and you can connect from outside. Of course, most ISPs block the SMB protocol, but most do NOT block the AFP protocol. So you'll probably want to use a Mac that can share via AFP.

This is how I was always able to access my G3 and the RAID enclosure it shared from anywhere.

That's not a bad idea and I wouldn't mind playing around with this on my iMac G3 - which beyond 10/100 Ethernet only has USB 1.1.

 

[Amethyst1]

Maybe Tony Mac is angry at you for some inexplicable reason?

My iMac to the rescue then.

Can this co-exist with OCLP on the same drive? Would I need to erase the SSD, install 10.6 and then re-install Ventura via OCLP?

Just extract the patched-for-Ivy-Bridge mach_kernelfrom this package. It can then be dropped into any 10.6.8 install but don't get your hopes up: 10.6.8 will boot but that's it. As my experience trying this on a 2012 retina MBP reveals, pretty much nothing else works hardware-wise, making this as useful as a VM.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Just extract the patched-for-Ivy-Bridge mach_kernelfrom this package. It can then be dropped into any 10.6.8 install but don't get your hopes up: 10.6.8 will boot but that's it. As my experience trying this on a 2012 retina MBP reveals, pretty much nothing else works hardware-wise, making this as useful as a VM.

Thanks for the heads up.

In that case I'll just focus on a partition with High Sierra so that I can run older software. Can this be added to the existing OCLP set up by re-sizing the SSD?

 

[ToniCH]

Totally unrelated but why does that site block my iPhone?

It blocks my iPhone and iMac too. It seems the site hates VPN-services. When I drop the VPN off I can access it fine. I have similar problems with some other Cloudflare sites too, but mostly then I get the click this if you are a human -screen over and over again. I guess the sites have different security settings in effect.

In that case I'll just focus on a partition with High Sierra so that I can run older software. Can this be added to the existing OCLP set up by re-sizing the SSD?

I don't know about that particular case but I have several computers with OCLP and multiboot to some different OS. Some of them were made by resizing and partitioning the SSD. Many even have different file systems between partitions.

 

[Amethyst1]

It blocks my iPhone and iMac too. It seems the site hates VPN-services.

I don’t use a VPN. Oh well.

 

[TheShortTimer]

It blocks my iPhone and iMac too. It seems the site hates VPN-services. When I drop the VPN off I can access it fine. I have similar problems with some other Cloudflare sites too, but mostly then I get the click this if you are a human -screen over and over again. I guess the sites have different security settings in effect.

I don’t use a VPN. Oh well.

I didn't use a VPN either but feeling curious, this is what happened when I accessed it with mine running:

With my VPN deactivated, normal access is restored.

I don't know about that particular case but I have several computers with OCLP and multiboot to some different OS. Some of them were made by resizing and partitioning the SSD. Many even have different file systems between partitions.

My brain really isn't switched on this week! Of course, there's no reason why this wouldn't work.

How could I forget this after watching Greg showcase 20 macOS installs on one machine? Many of them via OCLP...

I'll be in a better position to decide what happens next once I've run Migration Assistant and seen what works on Ventura.

There's only a handful of programs and data that I'd want to copy over to Ventura - serials, Firefox browser history and a few passwords.

 

[TheShortTimer]

It's time for an update!

My SSDs arrived this afternoon and what I'd expected to be a walk in the park turned out to be a challenge but I prevailed after a couple of false starts.

I connected the MX500 to a SATA & IDE to USB multi-adapter, which was then plugged into the 2011 MBP via a TB-USB 3.0 dongle with a view to using ddrescue to clone the entire dying drive to the SSD. Why didn't I go with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! you're probably asking? The set up on the 2011 features several partitions and unfortunately, neither program will replicate everything in one go - it has to be carried out sequentially, which I had no interest in doing.

The expectation was that this would be wrapped up in no time at all - I couldn't have been more wrong. Even with sudo activated and SIP disabled, ddrescue refused to proceed due to permissions issues. No matter, I switched the 13" 2012 MBP instead and connected the two machines via Thunderbolt in Target Disk Mode and transferred over the multi-adapter. From here, the plan was to use ddrescue on the 13" 2012 MBP and Ventura where the permissions issue doesn't occur and clone the 2011 MBP's HDD over Thunderbolt to the SSD.

disk5 is the 2011 MBP's HDD and of course, disk6 is the SSD connected via USB.

This plan didn't work out either...

...after almost three hours, only 100GB had been cloned. Which was hardly surprising given that the transfer rates were in the kB range instead of megabytes. At this rate, the remaining 900GB was going to take well over a day to complete! It was at this point that I remembered from my other misadventures with data recovery and ddrescue that on macOS its effectiveness is hindered when it accesses drives through USB instead of SATA.

Time to switch again to another computer! This time, an i7 PC that I've used in the past for ddrescue work (and it really deserves a post in the eBay bargains thread) - I connected the HDD and SSD to its SATA ports and booted the Linux distro System Rescue and tried again.

Look at the difference in the transfer rates!

Just over two hours later...

Third time was definitely a charm.

I then installed the SSD into the 2011 MBP and waited to see the outcome of my handiwork. There wasn't long to wait because the contrast in boot times was huge. High Sierra took 1m 27 secs to reach the login screen running from the HDD. It now takes 16 seconds running from the SSD.

Wow.

Disk Utility indicates that the drive setup has been duplicated exactly as I'd desired and the MX500's model number now replaces that of the Seagate HDD.

Mission accomplished! Well, 50% because I still need to upgrade the 13" 2012 MBP's SSD with the Ultra 3D but that will be much easier as the cloning can be done within macOS with CCC or SuperDuper! because there's only one partition to worry about.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I still need to upgrade the 13" 2012 MBP's SSD with the Ultra 3D but that will be much easier as the cloning can be done within macOS with CCC or SuperDuper! because there's only one partition to worry about.

The expectation was that this would be wrapped up in no time at all - I couldn't have been more wrong.

Looks like I was wrong again!

CCC failed to create a bootable clone. I knew something was amiss during the cloning phase when I spotted that CCC wasn't reporting the correct data size. No matter, I transferred the SSDs to the i7 PC with System Rescue and ran ddrescue - which definitely could be relied upon to clone everything correctly - right down to the last bit.

This is now second nature to me!

With the cloning process complete, I reconnected the Ultra 3D to the 13" 2012 MBP and Ventura booted from its new home. There was now just the matter to resize the 500GB partition to 2TB so that I could make use of the additional space. Further problems ensued here because Disk Utility was unable to facilitate this. Honestly, Apple. At one point that was a great program and you felt the need to hobble it for reasons known only to yourselves.

Google is a good friend because I found this thread featuring the experiences of others who were in the same predicament. Many of them used GParted in Linux to format the unallocated space to HFS and then resize their drives in macOS. This meant a return to the i7 PC for a bit more work in Linux. GParted wouldn't allow me to select HFS from the list of options to format the space, so I chose NTFS instead.

Once back on the MBP, I reformatted the NTFS partition to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and...

...that meant that I could then finally resize the SSD to 2TB in Disk Utility.

Success!

What have I learned from this episode? The reiteration that nowadays Disk Utility is a shadow of its former self and the optimist in me hopes that Apple will correct this one day. SuperDuper! and CCC - whilst hardly expensive, are unnecessary if you're prepared to just learn a couple of commands using free software. The paid software couldn't even deliver what I wanted whilst the free stuff did and that's quite a statement.

 

[ToniCH]

There has been many instances where I have not been able to format or partition a drive the way I want with a modern Apple Disk Utility but have been successful with an older version. Especially if one wants to do some older format or partitioning scheme its more likely to succeed with older versions.

About making bootable copies with the CCC with Big Sur and newer.

 

[Amethyst1]

No matter, I transferred the SSDs to the i7 PC […]

What are your plans for the original 500GB SSD?

From here, the plan was to use ddrescue on the 13" 2012 MBP and Ventura where the permissions issue doesn't occur and clone the 2011 MBP's HDD over Thunderbolt to the SSD.

Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode slows things down but not as dramatically as you saw.

 

[TheShortTimer]

There has been many instances where I have not been able to format or partition a drive the way I want with a modern Apple Disk Utility but have been successful with an older version. Especially if one wants to do some older format or partitioning scheme its more likely to succeed with older versions.

Same here and I've posted about it a few times - including this rant where my blood pressure subsided after booting into Snow Leopard and using its version of Disk Utility. NTFS for Mac turned out to be an unexpected solution for later versions of macOS but I've had difficulties transferring my licence to Ventura.

About making bootable copies with the CCC with Big Sur and newer.

Thanks for that article. It's interesting that Bombich struggle with this whilst the programmers of freeware ddrescue do not...

What are your plans for the original 500GB SSD?

Well spotted! I'd meant to mention that.

I'm thinking of using it for a neglected A1181 BlackBook project where a MB 4,x logic board will be replaced with a 5,2 one.

Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode slows things down but not as dramatically as you saw.

Gosh, that's disappointing. Thanks for the heads up - looks like FW800 is the better option in future?

 

[B S Magnet]

Thanks for that article. It's interesting that Bombich struggle with this whilst the programmers of freeware ddrescue do not...

I lament the block-clone feature of CCC’s older versions being removed once Bombich strove toward accommodating how partitioning in the world of hidden recovery partitions changed the way Macs depend on drives, post-Snow Leopard.