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SSD's, Recovery Partitions, and Mavericks

A

Angeldust

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 21, 2013
16
0
Hi everyone-

First time poster long time reader- hope that this isn't a stupid question:

I'm running a late 2011 MBP- I bought it with a 128GB SSD from Apple and recently upgraded to a 480GB Crucial drive- everything went perfectly with the install- with one small exception: I used Carbon Copy Cloner to Clone the initial drive and I unfortunately didn't tell it to copy over the Recovery Partition- more fool me, to be honest.

Now- I appreciate that Mavericks is due relatively soon, so my question is- if, when Mavericks comes out- I purchase it from the App Store and install it on my MBP, will I regain my recovery partition, or will I need to take some further steps to get it back? If the latter, which route will be easiest to minimise the amount of wear and tear my drive takes?

I'd really appreciate anyones advice :)

Thanks!
 
Is there any wear and tear to worry about with an install? Isn't it pretty much the same as normal drive use?
 
Angeldust said:
...
Now- I appreciate that Mavericks is due relatively soon, so my question is- if, when Mavericks comes out- I purchase it from the App Store and install it on my MBP, will I regain my recovery partition, or will I need to take some further steps to get it back? If the latter, which route will be easiest to minimise the amount of wear and tear my drive takes?
...
Click to expand...
When you install Mavericks, it should create a recovery partition. If it does not, it's not difficult to create the recovery partition. None of the methods I've seen for creating a recovery partition do much writing to the disk.

You know what will wear out the disk? People who keep running disk speed tests.

Erphern said:
Is there any wear and tear to worry about with an install? Isn't it pretty much the same as normal drive use?
Click to expand...
Nothing to worry about.
 
Thanks

Bear- I really appreciate your comment, I'm glad to know that the Mavericks install should give me a recovery partition. Regarding adding one should one be absent, which method would you recommend to avoid the least amount of hassle?

Regarding SSD damage, there seems to be a buzz around the internet that excessive reading and writing reduces the lifespan of the SSD- I'd be happy to learn that that's not the case, but there doesn't seem to be anything definitive either way, so I figure that working to be most cautious is the best option. I also only ran one initial speed test to ensure that I was getting appropriate speeds.

Thanks again!
 
Angeldust said:
Bear- I really appreciate your comment, I'm glad to know that the Mavericks install should give me a recovery partition. Regarding adding one should one be absent, which method would you recommend to avoid the least amount of hassle?
Click to expand...
I am not recommending a method currently as I have not seen any methods that have been tested with Mavericks yet. I may have just missed a post about it.

Angeldust said:
Regarding SSD damage, there seems to be a buzz around the internet that excessive reading and writing reduces the lifespan of the SSD- I'd be happy to learn that that's not the case, but there doesn't seem to be anything definitive either way, so I figure that working to be most cautious is the best option. I also only ran one initial speed test to ensure that I was getting appropriate speeds.

Thanks again!
Click to expand...
Yes, and buzz like that gets louder every time someone repeats it. You would have to check the specs for the specific drive you bought , but with current SSDs, most people won't reach the write limit in under 10 years. Note that the issue is with writing to the SSD and not reading from it.
 
If I clone my system partition to a SSD then run the maverics updater when booted off the SSD it will install the recovery to my HDD, right? I plan on leaving a copy of the clone on my HDD so if my system has a hardware issue I can boot off of either drive.

Or should I just wait for mav to come out before cloning the system partition to save the headache? :)
 
Angeldust said:
Bear- I really appreciate your comment, I'm glad to know that the Mavericks install should give me a recovery partition. Regarding adding one should one be absent, which method would you recommend to avoid the least amount of hassle?

Regarding SSD damage, there seems to be a buzz around the internet that excessive reading and writing reduces the lifespan of the SSD- I'd be happy to learn that that's not the case, but there doesn't seem to be anything definitive either way, so I figure that working to be most cautious is the best option. I also only ran one initial speed test to ensure that I was getting appropriate speeds.

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

Excessive writes to technically lower the life of an SSD, but with modern SSD's its very unlikely you'd ever see an SSD failure due to too many writes, they should last years and years before running out of cells to write to.

There was a recent issue with SSD's in 2012 MBA's with toshiba SSD's failing after a year and apple recently recalled those models, but I don't think that has anything to do with excessive writes, there's obviously just some kind of defect with those toshiba SSD's.
 
I recently did a complete clean install of Mavericks on my 2011 MBP. Before doing so, I created a DIY Fusion Drive with a Samsung 840 Pro SSD and the 7200 rpm HDD that came with my computer. Both drives were formatted and repartitioned in that process. Worked perfectly.

What I did notice, however, is that each drive seems to have it's own EFI and Recovery partitions. The sizes on each of those partitions differ. What I mean by that is, the Recovery partition on my SSD is ~250 mbs, while the recovery partition is ~650 mbs on the HDD.

This seems a bit redundant to me, and I'm not sure why both drives need to have their own Recovery partitions. No idea why they are different sizes either. I'm not cramped for space, so it's not really a big deal. I'm not sure if / how that would effect booting into Recovery.

Any ideas on this?
 
Like said earlier, you may see the write limit at around 10 years, and then parts of the drive should become read only, depending on the manufacturing
 
Angeldust said:
Bear- I really appreciate your comment, I'm glad to know that the Mavericks install should give me a recovery partition. Regarding adding one should one be absent, which method would you recommend to avoid the least amount of hassle?

Regarding SSD damage, there seems to be a buzz around the internet that excessive reading and writing reduces the lifespan of the SSD- I'd be happy to learn that that's not the case, but there doesn't seem to be anything definitive either way, so I figure that working to be most cautious is the best option. I also only ran one initial speed test to ensure that I was getting appropriate speeds.

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

Did you re-enable TRIM?
 
Angeldust said:
Regarding SSD damage, there seems to be a buzz around the internet that excessive reading and writing reduces the lifespan of the SSD- I'd be happy to learn that that's not the case
Click to expand...

This is rubbish. Look at the specs for modern SSDs - they equate to 5+ years of significant amounts reads and writes per day (10's of GB's per day for years) - very similar to the SATA drives which are currently available.

The notion of "babying" SSDs is outdated as of years ago.
 
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