Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Boot Volume missing, command line help
- Thread starter honeycombz
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Heard back. They said the cable was fine but BOTH the spinner and the flash storage are bad. This sounds very odd right?
That is really hard to believe. I wonder if they don't know how to unwind what you did with the partitions and all, so they plan to just put new drives in there? But hey... free new drives for you and they will set you back up, so win win I guess.
Well, I wouldn't call it a win win exactly. They do have a main workhorse for the entire week plus the headache but... I guess. Like you said lol.
Wait, what did I do with the partitions? I'm confused.
[doublepost=1490821391][/doublepost]Should I be concerned that fusion drive in general is unreliable? On my mac pro I have a SSD/Spinner setup but not some janky fusion drive setup. User folder on spinner, OS/Apps on SSD. Works fine. Something about "fusion" just sounds like trouble to me.
Wait, what did I do with the partitions? I'm confused.
[doublepost=1490821391][/doublepost]Should I be concerned that fusion drive in general is unreliable? On my mac pro I have a SSD/Spinner setup but not some janky fusion drive setup. User folder on spinner, OS/Apps on SSD. Works fine. Something about "fusion" just sounds like trouble to me.
Fusion drives are much better than manually handling data, since the Fusion drive can move data on a block level rather than a file level. If a single block of your iTunes code is used constantly when iTunes is running but the rest is only ever read once when the app is opened, the Fusion drive will know to only keep that single block. Very efficient in that way. And Fusion Drives are no less reliable than a striped RAID setup. Since data is as I said not split up on a file level, but rather on a block level, losing a single of the two drives might mean that some data is entirely corrupted, because some part were on one drive whilst other parts were on the other so in that sense, it's more unreliable than having a single point of failure, but in general, i find the Fusion Drive amazing and I have no worries regarding reliability. But if you prefer it, you can manually un-fuse them and have the same setup as on your Mac Pro. Though the SSD space will be way less efficiently used, and you will never have simultaneous data access like the Fusion Drive sometimes offers because of its striping-like approach.
You mentioned something in your first post you had done something or installed something that may have caused this is what i was referring to.
Nah... like @casperes1996 said they work quite well. I think you are making life tough in yourself trying to manually manage the data. I would just let the Fusion drive handle it and not worry.
Of course you always want a backup.
Thanks for the help. I think I'm going to buy a couple WD Passport HD externals to add to my arsenal of data redunancy on-site and off-site. I'm interested in Backblaze but I don't know... I have read a number of stories of people not being able to recover their data from those places. Not really into time machine so much. I like Super Duper.
Buy something that isn't Western Digital. Western Digital's disks have only a USB interface directly on the disk, which means that if you damage that USB connector you cannot get any information off the disk. Other vendors use regular SATA disks, so if the USB connector on the enclosure fails, you can take the disk out of the enclosure and it has a chance of still working in another enclosure.
Do you have a recommendation? I was looking at icycube at one point but wasn’t sure. http://www.icydock.com/goods_cat.php?id=129
What drive enclosures for mac would be good? Tool free might be nice. I'm not a big fan of the docking stations. Maybe if you have tons of drives to swap out.
The ones that support UASP are generally the best - and though the Mac does not support UASP itself as of right now, it might in the future so you'll be prepared. And they tend to be faster regardless. Aside from that anything goes.
I think @casperes1996 might be referring to this limitation of macOS mentioned in another thread. But yes, Macs do support UASP since I think Mountain Lion (I might be off with that).
That is exactly what I meant, yes. Thanks for clarifying for me, hehe
Can you boot from a UASP drive? What brands do people like? Orico? Inateck? Sabrent? I'm looking for an enclosure for a 3.5" drive, I guess USB 3. I've always liked the WD Caviar Blacks but someone mentioned HGST I think.
You can boot from pretty much any USB drive as long as the drive is blessed (marked as bootable).
I like the Satechi and StarTech enclosures myself.
i wouldn't mind a nice 4-5 bay multi-drive enclosure... that isn't going to corrupt all my data.
OP wrote:
"Can you boot from a UASP drive? What brands do people like? Orico? Inateck? Sabrent? I'm looking for an enclosure for a 3.5" drive, I guess USB 3. I've always liked the WD Caviar Blacks but someone mentioned HGST I think."
Yes, of course you can boot from an external USB3 drive/enclosure/dock/adapter that supports UASP. I'm running from a setup like that as I type this reply.
I don't think UASP is going to help much with a platter-based hard drive, they're too slow. UASP DOES make a difference when using an SSD, however.
So… UASP isn't going to help with "WD Caviar blacks", or any other HDD.
With a USB3 device that supports UASP, using an SSD, you ought to see read speeds around 430mbps and writes around 250-330mbps (write speeds depend upon the drive mfr. and the drive size, they vary).
Too many folks "overthink" this.
Just get the right drive, plug it in, and use it.
That's pretty much all there is to it!
"Can you boot from a UASP drive? What brands do people like? Orico? Inateck? Sabrent? I'm looking for an enclosure for a 3.5" drive, I guess USB 3. I've always liked the WD Caviar Blacks but someone mentioned HGST I think."
Yes, of course you can boot from an external USB3 drive/enclosure/dock/adapter that supports UASP. I'm running from a setup like that as I type this reply.
I don't think UASP is going to help much with a platter-based hard drive, they're too slow. UASP DOES make a difference when using an SSD, however.
So… UASP isn't going to help with "WD Caviar blacks", or any other HDD.
With a USB3 device that supports UASP, using an SSD, you ought to see read speeds around 430mbps and writes around 250-330mbps (write speeds depend upon the drive mfr. and the drive size, they vary).
Too many folks "overthink" this.
Just get the right drive, plug it in, and use it.
That's pretty much all there is to it!
Advantage of getting a UASP drive still, is that if you eventually want to upgrade the drive, you didn't have to also get a new enclosure, if the enclosure itself is limiting and designed only for spinning disk performance