Drive Cloning (1 Viewer)

[Christian Behrens]

Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that Adobe CS would not work, their installer is known to be the worst in the Mac market. Same goes for bootcamp, of course. Migration Assistent will not move your Windows bootcamp installation either.

Those two items aside, I'd wager it would still save you considerable time to use Migration Assistent and only re-install CS.

Dave,

I'm not sure where you look for drives, but FW is not typically double the price of USB drives. However, FW800 *is* more than double the speed compared to USB2. What matters is the sustained data rate, and USB2's nominal 480Mb/s is only good for bursts, not over a longer period of time.

If I didn't have already an easy to open case with all the interfaces, I'd get one of the docks that OWC offers. This way you can just buy bare drives and don't have to worry about enclosures.

-Christian

 

[DaveF]

Looking at 1TB external drive, OWC's external FW800 drives are $220 while USB2.0 external drives at BestBuy are $119. So my quick search showed FW drives being nearly double that of USB. EDIT: I was looking at OWC's high end drives. I see they do have FW800 1TB for $165.

I bought a USB enclosure to re-use a PATA drive. I wasn't really impressed. The whole affair died after a year or so and was noisy. The external drives I've since bought are silent and have lasted longer.

A doubling of speed for TimeMachine use isn't worth an extra $100 (for me or my wife). It might be worth $40.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Even at $119 a 1GB drive is a complete ripoff. Now a 1TB drive...

 

[DaveF]

Indeed...

Thanks to the edit button, I have no idea what you're talking about

 

[Carlo_M]

One thing I will vouch for owc's enclosures is that they use oxford chipsets which are iron clad and high performing. I've benchmarked my owc enclosure bs another FireWire 400 extrnal with the same rpm HD inside and the owc enclosure was 15-20% faster in cloning my 150gb of data.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

I used to think that way as well, Carlo. I have two OWC drives that have performed flawlessly for years. But this last enclosure I've bought from them has turned into a real lemon. I have had to send it back twice because I am unable to boot into a Mac via the FireWire connection. Both times they claimed to have replaced the Oxford bridge and tested it on a G5 (hello...no Intel machines to test on?) and sent it back and both times it didn't work. This last time I called and said I wanted the enclosure replaced outright instead of "repaired" and they agreed to that.

Fast forward to two weeks later and I still have no enclosure. I called today and at first they told me they couldn't replace it because they no longer sell the drive enclosure I'm having a problem with...even though it still shows up for sale on their web site and "in stock." Then they transferred me to their tech people who tried to blame my FireWire cable (no...it works with every other drive I have), my partitioning scheme (no...I know to use GUID) and Apple's supposedly poor FireWire driver support (total BS, as I can boot a machine off of any other FireWire equipped drive I have. So he said they would send it back to their lab for more rigorous "stress testing" on an Intel Mac. If I don't get a satisfactory resolution soon, I may wind up filing a complaint with the local BBB.

 

[Christian Behrens]

Wow Michael, sorry to hear that! Clearly that's no way to deal with an issue like that, no matter what. Hopefully they'll do you right soon!

-Christian