3 Questions about external booting...

[Ashapalan]

I went ahead and purchased a d2 LaCie hard drive and so far so good. I have created a bootable backup (10.4.5) which i am currently using.

I have a few questions in my mind and was wondering if anyone knew the answers. I'll jump straight in...

1) If I use this external hard drive to boot from, will it's life be seriously affected? (consumer user, no heavy apps). Also, will using it in this way save the life of my internal hard drive?

2) My internal drive is 5400 where as this external drive is 7200 rpm. Does the fact that the drive is connected by firewire mean that the whole OS wont experience any speed gains from this extra disk speed?

3) If the firewire cable were to become unattached, would the OS crash or simply jump to the internal, and if it would crash, would this damage any of the hardware?

Thanks for any answers anyone can come up with!

 

[Eniregnat]

I went ahead and purchased a d2 LaCie hard drive and so far so good. I have created a bootable backup (10.4.5) which I am currently using.
[/URL] I have 3 Laci drives and love them. One has a carbon copy of my os and a secondary back up of my documents, the second is for editing, the third I use at work.

1) If I use this external hard drive to boot from, will it's life be seriously affected? (consumer user, no heavy apps). Also, will using it in this way save the life of my internal hard drive?

No, life of the drive will not be adversely affected. You also wont really save your internal drive. What's the point of all of this. By the time a normal drive would fail you would no longer be using the computer.

2) My internal drive is 5400 where as this external drive is 7200 rpm. Does the fact that the drive is connected by firewire mean that the whole OS wont experience any speed gains from this extra disk speed?

You could see a speed change, but I don't think it is likely. The limit is FW400, which is still pretty speedy. If you put in a new drive, you will see a difference! I moved from a 4200 to a 5400, and I the new drive was more efficient with power. I gained about 10% more uptime.

3) If the firewire cable were to become unattached, would the OS crash or simply jump to the internal, and if it would crash, would this damage any of the hardware?

That would be bad. No it will not jump to the internal HD's OS. The problem may not be terminal though. OS X would likely recover, but it could be bad if it were actively writing to the disk.

For me, I spit one 250Gb drive into 2 backups. 1 is a carbon copy. The second is a manual copy of my important documents and media. This makes the most sense, and provides for a lot of redundancy.

 

[Ashapalan]

For me, I spit one 250Gb drive into 2 backups. 1 is a carbon copy. The second is a manual copy of my important documents and media. This makes the most sense, and provides for a lot of redundancy.

That actually sounds like a much better/simpler way of backing up. So i'd have to reformat the external drive and then create 2 partitions using disk utility?

 

[Eniregnat]

Disk Utility, Erase Disk (I generally zero out), Partition (set number and size to what ever size you want), rename, etc...

Then I use Carbon Copy Cloner, but others like Super Duper. SilverKeeper is another option. I have used SK, but I don't like it very much. CCC is not free, but it's demo is limitless. It costs 5$ U.S. SK is free. SuperDuper is nearly $30.0 U.s. Always check your clones, and always follow the directions.

Before you clone, I recommend running, some sort of system health utility, or run the standard scripts in terminal.

Also ONYX or Main Menu are good maintenance utilities. MacSweeper is for 10.2 and before. I use Main Menu, but ONYX used to be my favorite. These are really just advanced uses of Apple script, at least ONYX and Mac Sweeper are. I really have admiration for these utilities that basically run allow a person to run standard OS maintenance routines with out needing to know how command line works. Brilliant! They also allow access to other features of OSX that you might not easily find through the normal GUI if at all.