[OT] Looking For OS X Troubleshooting Suggestions 22

[Bob Sneidar]

Hi Jim. I didn't mean to imply I knew more, as I can see that may be how my post looked. I say that to give people confidence in following my IT advice. Sorry if it sounded like I was being condescending. 

That being said, the internal SATA interface is always going to be faster that an external USB or even a firewire interface.  Even an external eSata may be slower, because you are going through a translation interface, but it probably won't be noticeable, whereas a firewire or usb interface will probably be quite noticeable. 

I have not used USB 3 yet, but my sense is that an internal PATA drive is always going to be the fastest, all other things being equal. 

What I would do is create the clone, then put the cloned drive into the device. Use the newer drive as the production drive. At that point, you can reformat the old drive, using the Write Zero's option which is the only way for the Disk Utility to lock out bad blocks or sectors, and then if you want, you can use that as your CCC image backup. 

It doesn't hurt to take advantage of iCloud or some other cloud based service either, or perhaps using a Time Machine backup. I use TM, but restores can be a little tricky, and they are not bootable. A CCC image is. In the event of a complete production drive failure, you can still boot into the spare drive and meet your deadlines. 

Bob


On Sep 13, 2012, at 12:07 PM, Jim Hurley wrote:

>> If spotlight is failing it is because it has encountered bad blocks in the indexing process, and the attempt to relocate the data has failed. Read my prior post. I'm really good at this stuff. It's what I do for a living. 
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
> 
> Bob,
> 
> First, let me say, I enjoy people who are good at what they do, and are not afraid to say so. (I just wish you were doing what you do in my neighborhood.)
> 
> Second, I have many of the symptoms discussed earlier on this topic. 
> 
> But I have one more very sophisticated diagnostic test I perform. I listen. Every so often, the HD on my Mac Mini squeaks for a few minutes. That can't be good.
> 
> Generally things are fine. So I assume the contents of my existing internal drive are ok.  So, what would you recommend? 
> 
> If I were to create a Carbon Copy Clone on an external drive and, in the future,  always boot from that external copy, would there be a performance hit?
> 
> Jim