Doing a "transplant" on my Mac Pro!!!

[Tim Aucoin]

I'm in the middle of transferring my "Macintosh HD" HDD contents over to a new SSD I just purchased. The HDD is 380GB and I purchased a 420GB SSD. I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner to do the transfer and according to the guys in Cupertino that I was speaking with yesterday, I will be quite pleasantly surprised at the massive increase in speed I'm about to discover once the transfer is done.

The SSD came with this fun sticker that says "My SSD is faster than your HDD!!!"

I will post my final results once the transfer is complete. The cloning is taking some time which is expected when copying absolutely EVERYTHING over! :Sleeping:

 

[HulkSmash]

Tim.. SSD's are the prophecy. The speed difference is..borderline obscene, you'll love it..!

 

[MatthewTimothy]

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Tim.. SSD's are the prophecy. The speed difference is..borderline obscene, you'll love it..!

That's what I've been hearing! I'm sure once I witness the difference, I will be switching my production PC over to one as well. I will also take comfort in knowing that SSD's are a lot less prone to failure than HDD's (obviously!!). In the last 20 years, I've had around 6 HDD failures in the shop and not one RAM chip failure. That speaks volumes.

Don't get me wrong though... I will still be doing daily back-ups with both CCC and Time Machine to a 3TB drive in Bay 4. On top of that, I have a DROBO unit hooked up to the entire network that houses EVERYTHING. Backs up the server and all critical customer artwork files. Can't be too careful with data!!!

I was pleasantly surprised at the prices of SSD's. The 420GB cost me just under $700.... not too shabby at all!

 

[WildWestDesigns]

With prices having gone up for HDD due to part supply that has helped reconcile the cost difference on some of your SSDs which in my opinion going to bring about the transfer to SSDs that much quicker. It'll still be a ways before it all goes that way, but this helped speed the process up some.

 

[Jack Knight1979]

oh please keep us posted. I've got a mac pro, suped to the max. I do not have an ssd running as I run raids on every drive on it. If the speed is that drastic I may have to raid up a set for the C:\

 

[The Vector Doctor]

Are you going to then delete some stuff off of the SSD? Sounds like you won't have much room left.

 

[Tim Aucoin]

UPDATE....
Not going as well as planned. Nothing to do with the SSD, and THIS IS NOT A MAC ISSUE... so please for the love of all things good and pure, please don't turn this thread into a PC vs. Mac thing, okay!

The HDD I was attempting to clone is the original HDD that came with the Mac Pro back in 2008. The reason for this whole cloning to the SSD is because my philosophy is WHEN, NOT IF a hard drive fails. A 4 year old hard drive with daily heavy use is bound to be a ticking time bomb, so I figured I'd be proactive and clone it before failure occures. Uh huh!!!!

Did you know that the most stressful thing you can do to a hard drive is clone it? Well, guess who's hard drive failed WHILE cloning it?!! :ROFLMAO: It's not the end of the world, and I have actually had quite a good laugh over the whole thing. My data is all intact on a second & third drive as well as on my DROBO, so really, the inconvenience is in reinstalling all the software and print drivers, etc... Talk about great timing though. This drive was on it's last legs and the cloning procedure is what brought final death to it.

I have to say something about Apple though. The Apple Joint Venture Program (for small businesses) is the best thing I've ever gotten involved with. If you have Mac's in your shop and you haven't heard about Joint Venture, I urge you to look into it. The membership cost is around $599 per year, and the service and support you get for that is nothing short of amazing. I was on the phone with them yesterday for over an hour going over how to proceed with the cloning process. Then today when the failure occured, I got a call back within an hour and he spent a good long time with me trying to get the system running. Once we determined the drive had failed, I had an appointment at my local Apple Store within another hour. I brough the Mac Pro over to them and we were able to recover the little bit of data I had stored on my desktop. They are going to install OSX Lion onto my SSD for me, do a complete tune-up on the system, clean it out and have it ready for me TOMORROW afternoon. My cost is $0.00!!! Talk about excellent service. Joint Venture is worth every penny in my opinion. And, when you put in a request for a callback from a Joint Venture team member, they call you from Cupertino (Apple Headquarters) as opposed to some overseas call centre! I've had call backs during the day and as late as 10PM, 7 days a week. Good for computers, iPads, iPhones, etc... Hardware and software. I highly recommend it!

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Are you going to then delete some stuff off of the SSD? Sounds like you won't have much room left.

Actually Eric, the drive that the SSD is replacing is smaller. The original HDD was 320GB, and I was using about 210GB of space on it. The new SSD is 480GB, so I have plenty of room.

After the incident today (see previous post), I have decided that I'm purchasing a SECOND 480GB SSD and I'm going to keep a "running" clone copy of the original (boot drive) SSD on an ongoing basis.

 

[Baz]

Oh that would have never happened if you were working with a pc

I couldn't resist! It's Friday!

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Did you know that the most stressful thing you can do to a hard drive is clone it? Well, guess who's hard drive failed WHILE cloning it?!! :ROFLMAO:

I actually had to deal with that with my mom's computer. Except we knew that it was on it's way out and we were trying to clone it before it totally failed. The speed that it was at was way way low, but study. It took a whole day to clone it with 3 box fans blowing on it, but we got it cloned.

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Oh that would have never happened if you were working with a pc

I couldn't resist! It's Friday!

You know I WILL see you in person again some day Baz?!!

 

[Baz]

You know I WILL see you in person again some day Baz?!!

Looking forward to it Tim! Cheers

 

[rfulford]

Can you do a fresh install on the SSD and restore from a TM Backup? Good luck and enjoy.

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Got the Mac Pro back from Apple Store yesterday. They did a fresh install of 10.7 (Lion) on the SSD. I am in the process of re-installing all software. While at the store on Friday, we were able to salvage the desktop data from the corrupt HDD.

Now that I have it back running the main OS on the SSD... I can tell you that this thing is BLAZING FAST!!! It's like a whole new computer! I'm almost getting whiplash because the windows and programs are opening so fast. Well worth the purchase and well worth the headache I'm going through to reinstall everything! I purchased another SSD for the production PC I have at the office. That one will be next to get the transplant once this is up and running again!

 

[The Vector Doctor]

I run a program on my HD's called SpeedTools S.M.A.R.T. Alert. It checks on the health of my hard drives on a constant basis. Hopefully it does the jobs its supposed to

 

[Tim Aucoin]

I hear ya Eric! I will be getting a product recommended by the tech's at the Apple Store called Drive Genius 3 (by Pro Soft). It is what they use in store (among other stuff) to diagnose computer HDD's when they come in for service. For $99, it's not a bad investment.

I'm 80% up and running this morning. Just need to get a few more serial numbers and activation codes from software vendors. Adobe was very good in helping me get my CS5 going. I have an upgrade from CS4, and lost my CS4 serial number. They had it to me in under 5 minutes!

Just need to reinstall all of my fonts and all should be good. Nice fresh start. Can't wait to get the PC drive switched out next! :Big Laugh

 

[Geary]

Mac Snow Leopard w/ Old stuff

Hey there,

Old member here....LONG time MacAddict. Saw your post and wanted to chat at you about my continued needs for better software stuff. Look in your PMs please friend?

~Gear

 

[phototec]

UPDATE....
My cost is $0.00!!! Talk about excellent service. Joint Venture is worth every penny in my opinion.

Glad to hear you are getting the help you need from Apple, just want to clarify one point, IT WAS NO FREE. At $599 per year for 4 years is a total cost is $2,396, or even if you only purchased one year, $599 is not "0", or FREE. You paid for the service, just in advance like any insurance policy.

Good luck!

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Glad to hear you are getting the help you need from Apple, just want to clarify one point, IT WAS NO FREE. At $599 per year for 4 years is a total cost is $2,396, or even if you only purchased one year, $599 is not "0", or FREE. You paid for the service, just in advance like any insurance policy.

Good luck!

Thanks for pointing that out! So, paying $599 is not free? Damn, those bastards ripped me off!

Now, just so you don't think I'm a total idiot, I realize that $599 is not "0" or FREE (as you put it). If you will notice, earlier in the post I did mention that I paid $599 per year for the membership. My point was that AT THE TIME OF THE REPAIR I was charged nothing, in comparison to going in and getting that kind of repair and service WITHOUT the Joint Venture membership. Nowhere in my post did I say the word FREE! I think most people understood that, but really, thanks anyhow for pointing out the obvious!

But, just in case everyone thinks I'm an naive enough to think I missed the point that I actually paid (up front) for my service... I do realize that yes, I paid for the membership and TECHNICALLY that repair was not actually free, but I did pay $0 when I picked up my system. The membership works out to cost $1.64 per day. Considering that in the last year, I've utilized Joint Venture around 14 times for everything from a major hard drive failure to getting advice on the best way to back up my system (and you should hear the cool answer I got on that one!!), I personally think it's money well spent. Considering I don't drink coffee, soda or any other crap, smoke or buy lunches, $1.64 per day becomes spare pocket change and I can't think of a better way to spend it!

Okay... time to get back to work. :Big Laugh