The nMP arrives on Thursday. I need to migrate 960GB from the Macintosh HD on my existing MP 3,1 to the new machine. Is FW800 the fastest protocol to do this? Some guy today at the Apple store told me with that much data I'm looking at 3-4 days over FW800 using migration assistant? Really? Is there a faster way?
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3-4 DAYS?!? Really?
- Thread starter Michael73
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There is no FireWire on the Mac Pro X.
On a subastantive Mac Pro, a copy of that size, 4 to 6 hours from FireWire to an internal SATA drive. 5 to 10 hours, FireWire to FireWire drive.
On a subastantive Mac Pro, a copy of that size, 4 to 6 hours from FireWire to an internal SATA drive. 5 to 10 hours, FireWire to FireWire drive.
It's a logical conclusion. Or, perhaps it doesn't exist. Then neither does this thread...
i connected my 3,1 to my wired network and i guess because of iCloud or back-to-my-mac, my 3,1 showed up in finder. i wanted to have a fresh 6,1 so i did NOT use migration assistant, i just dragged some items in my Home folder [docs/pdfs/iPhoto lib etc] and smoked a cigar outside, came back in and it was done. Granted, it was only 100-200GB tops. You have a portable 1TB? connect to 3,1 copy and paste into 6,1. I did that with my GoFlex portable for the larger stuff.
It is likely that confusion and miscommunication are at play here.
Yes, FW800 is your best bet.
If it is coming from a reasonably fast mechanical hard drive you may top out at 100MB/sec or so. I would guess 3-4 hours transfer time for mostly large files. Lots of small files can slow things down but more by a factor of 2 than a factor of 24 (days vs. hours).
I would boot the old system in target disk mode. On the new system use a thunderbolt display or thunderbolt->FW adapter to get FW800 connected.
Kick it off, then watch a couple of movies or go to bed.
Yup, get a TB>FW800 adaptor and use "Target Disk Mode"
I have NOT done this so I'm not 100% sure that will work with an adaptor.
In reverse, I couldn't connect a Lacie TB drive with a TB>FW800 adaptor to my
3,1 mac pro's FW ports !!
We are talking several hours but NOT days !
M.
I have NOT done this so I'm not 100% sure that will work with an adaptor.
In reverse, I couldn't connect a Lacie TB drive with a TB>FW800 adaptor to my
3,1 mac pro's FW ports !!
We are talking several hours but NOT days !
M.
Migration Assistant works via Ethernet, too. That should be a tad faster than via a FireWire connection.
The fastest way should still be putting your old drive into a USB3 enclosure, attaching that to your new Mac Pro and pointing Migration Assistant at it.
The fastest way should still be putting your old drive into a USB3 enclosure, attaching that to your new Mac Pro and pointing Migration Assistant at it.
I was fortunate enough to have installed a USB3 card in my MP 3,1. I also go a quote of 6+ days to transfer my data disk to my NAS. I offloaded to a usb3 drive, in about an hour, and then used the nMP to transfer to a temporary thunderbolt drive. I am awaiting a raid unit from OWC.
You might have luck with either a multi connector external hard disk (but I don't know if anything with FireWire has USB3, just USB2)
My backup was to remove the physical disk, and use a USB3 edge connector with wall wart power supply.
You might have luck with either a multi connector external hard disk (but I don't know if anything with FireWire has USB3, just USB2)
My backup was to remove the physical disk, and use a USB3 edge connector with wall wart power supply.
USB 3 and TB don't make a single HDD any faster. Presuming all of this 900+ GB is on one HDD, FW800 , USB 3 , and TB are going to deliver about equal results. When set to FW Target disk mode, the old Mac Pro 3,1 is a drive chassis. Already have a super expensive one already.
If that is a software RAID 1 volume then FW800 thru target disk mode is still better. Only probably safer to run migration assistant after have configured an 'admin' account for the new machine, if take care to not to introduce any UID shifting issues.
Good to know. Related to the TM comment...currently one of my four drive bays in the MP 3,1 is dedicated to TM. The plan is to use the Drobo 5D I got a few months ago and create a partition to use as my TM drive. It'll be connected to the nMP via Thunderbolt.
The Macintosh HD is a WD 2TB SATA III 6GB/s 7200RPM drive. It's going to be a mixture of both large and small files...all told we're talking millions of files.
Yesterday I grabbed a FW800 > TB adaptor at the Apple store. The guy who helped me wished me good luck, winked and said, "Just make sure you get the transfer done in two weeks so you can return the adaptor after you're done using it."
If I were just transferring stuff in my Documents file, it would be one thing but I need to set up the whole computer and I'm worried I might goof stuff up. For example, my entire Win7 VM is in a directory inside of the Documents folder and I can't afford to mess that up. I think I'm going the Migration Assistant route.
The only advantage the guy at the Apple store said to use TDM was that while using TDM, the machine remains usable whereas when using MA you're completely locked out of using the machines while the cloning occurs. Good thing I have a MBP to use in the meantime
Why would Ethernet be faster than FW800? Everything I've read / heard is that FW800 outpaces Ethernet. Am I missing something?
clean, clean, clean
You need to get as much data off of the cMP as possible. Please tell me you are not planning on filling 900GB of the 1TB drive immediately!!! Sounds like you are in desperate need of external storage. I highly recommend you get one of the Seagate Thunderbolt sleds or USB3 connectors for one their GoFlex drives. You can plug in any SATA drive directly to the connector and get to it as fast as the drive hardware will allow.
Get everything you don't absolutely need off the old machine before using the migration assistant.
To me filling an SSD to 90%+ right off the bat is kinda crazy. Maybe the biggest advantage the nMP has over the old machine is very fast external I/O.
You need to get as much data off of the cMP as possible. Please tell me you are not planning on filling 900GB of the 1TB drive immediately!!! Sounds like you are in desperate need of external storage. I highly recommend you get one of the Seagate Thunderbolt sleds or USB3 connectors for one their GoFlex drives. You can plug in any SATA drive directly to the connector and get to it as fast as the drive hardware will allow.
Get everything you don't absolutely need off the old machine before using the migration assistant.
To me filling an SSD to 90%+ right off the bat is kinda crazy. Maybe the biggest advantage the nMP has over the old machine is very fast external I/O.
Just use a 1Gb/s wired ethernet connection. Both machines have this. Connect either via the switch ports on your router (assuming you have one) or use a crossover cable. Both have dual ethernet so you could do other stuff while copying the data. Just start the copy before you go to bed and it will be done in the morning. I typically get around 80-100MB/s through ethernet so it's good enough for a one-off transfer.
Like others have said though you probably need some external storage for the nMP. If you are doing to use that storage for production stuff, I'd go down the thunderbolt route, not the USB 3.0 route as it's much quicker. I know you can't connect thunderbolt to the old Mac Pro, but you don't need to as you are using your network for data transfer.
Also I'd have a physically separate disk for TM. Putting your backups and your data on the same disks is asking for trouble.
Like others have said though you probably need some external storage for the nMP. If you are doing to use that storage for production stuff, I'd go down the thunderbolt route, not the USB 3.0 route as it's much quicker. I know you can't connect thunderbolt to the old Mac Pro, but you don't need to as you are using your network for data transfer.
Also I'd have a physically separate disk for TM. Putting your backups and your data on the same disks is asking for trouble.
My Experience
I had to move 700GB from Mac 3,1 to nMP. I tried Migration assistant using TB Firewire adapter in target disk mode and via GigE. At first, it wouldn't even work because I had Server installed. Annoying. When I uninstalled Server and tried again, it was going so sloooooowly after an hour, I took another approach. I have a USB3 card in the 3,1 so connected a new SATA drive (one I bought for the new array on the nMP) and did a full Time Machine backup. Took about 6 hours. Then swapped drive to the nMP and restored. Took about 3 hours.
Not sure why I struggled so much doing straight Mac<-->Mac connection, but, for me, using a fast disk in the middle turned out to be faster......
If I had planned in advance, a single fresh backup to a new empty fast drive would enable the fastest possible way to get nMP up and running.
I had to move 700GB from Mac 3,1 to nMP. I tried Migration assistant using TB Firewire adapter in target disk mode and via GigE. At first, it wouldn't even work because I had Server installed. Annoying. When I uninstalled Server and tried again, it was going so sloooooowly after an hour, I took another approach. I have a USB3 card in the 3,1 so connected a new SATA drive (one I bought for the new array on the nMP) and did a full Time Machine backup. Took about 6 hours. Then swapped drive to the nMP and restored. Took about 3 hours.
Not sure why I struggled so much doing straight Mac<-->Mac connection, but, for me, using a fast disk in the middle turned out to be faster......
If I had planned in advance, a single fresh backup to a new empty fast drive would enable the fastest possible way to get nMP up and running.
That seems like a good idea.
Depending on the software between systems and how much "gunk"
is in the system, I have had good and also awful experiences with "data migration"
In most cases "fresh" installs and setups are better IMHO.
That's exactly what I am doing with my new cMP.
you're looking at 2 hours per 600GB if using USB 3 if cloning in Block Mode. Just did a backup of my machine and the end result was a little less than 2 hours.
I transferred 280gb from my old Firewire drive via USB2 and it took 6 hours. Wow, slow. So it turns out that all my external FireWire drives also have ESATA ports. These ports are much faster than FireWire 800 and USB2, so I ordered one of these Lacie Thunderbolt Hubs from Apple as they had the fastest shipping times. http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10574
I figured I'd probably keep my RAID and external drive for at least another year, so I thought it was worth having them connected via ESATA.
If either one fails, I'll be upgrading to thunderbolt drives down the road.
I figured I'd probably keep my RAID and external drive for at least another year, so I thought it was worth having them connected via ESATA.
If either one fails, I'll be upgrading to thunderbolt drives down the road.
For block copy, I think the target disk needs to be at least as big as the source. Most people going to nMP will be migrating from bigger HDD to smaller SSD.
Also, and this may be dated/wrong, but isn't it a bad idea to write to every block on an SSD (even with blocks marked as free on in the file system)? I somehow thought that did bad things to the SSD controller's performance. Again, this may be old or wrong, but I think I was told to NOT do block clones to SSD in the past.
The migration assistant is not doing a block level copy. You absolutely do NOT want to do a block level copy to a Mac Pro 2013 at this time anyway because it takes a special variant of the OS. (10.9.2 may remove that). Moving between systems block level copies are generally an extremely bad idea period.
Block copy can be OK as backups or creating disk clones for nearly identical systems. Block copies between substantively different systems is bad idea.
