Install Safari to a different hard drive, not the boot drive, on a Windows PC

I have a dual drive laptop. The boot drive is a small SSD and the 2nd drive is a large SATA drive. I would like to install as many programs as possible to the SATA drive. When I installed Safari, it didn't give me a choice as to where to install it. Is there a way to do it?

neencirksena wrote:
I have a computer with 2 hard drives on it. I had my music on hard drive C and i had to move the music to hard drive D, but now itunes cant read the music files so all the "!" show up next to the songs. How do i get itunes to read my music files from hard drive D now???
Just point iTunes to use new location of the library.
If you have moved the whole iTunes folder that will do the trick. After pointing iTunes to the new location, choose "File -> Library -> Organize Library" to force iTunes to rebuild the database.
If you had moved only the music files to the new location, iTunes have to build up a new database (library).
If you did so, point iTunes to a empty folder on the new drive. Best name it iTunes.
Then drag the musik (whole folder) just to the iTunes main window or use "File -> Add to library" and point to the music folder.
After all is done, delete the source folder.
Cheers - Lupunus
Message was edited by: lupunus

Similar Messages

Which drive is the boot drive?

I installed a 2nd hard drive in my G4 dual 1ghz sometime around 2001. I'm now on a G5 and would like to pull the 2nd drive from the G4 and put it in a firewire enclosure to use with the G5. How can I tell which drive is the boot drive and which is the secondary drive? I kind of remember that the 2nd drive went in the lower bay but I'm not 100% sure. Any other caveats to pulling out this drive? Thanks in advance.
Power Mac dual 1ghz

The system profiler should tell you the serial number of the hard drive, or type of hard drive when you select it in the IDE bus. Compare that with the label on the drive itself.
Both bays can have boot drives, though typically master jumper drives are better able to boot than slaves on certain operating systems.
You can tell the existing boot drive, because it is the first drive that appears in the upper right hand corner of the desktop if you view and arrange the desktop by kind.
If you just want to transfer data over from a G4 to a G5, you may want to use Target Disk Mode:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583
Note, if the G4 is the kind that can boot into Mac OS 9, set it as the Target machine. In addition, if it is running 10.2.2 or earlier it should be the target machine, because 10.2.2 and earlier don't understand the Journaled operating system which may be installed on your G5.

How to backup internal A/V hard drive (not the OS drive) to a 2nd external drive (not the TM drive)?

I'm a new Mac Pro user. Now running OS X Lion. Always used Windows platforms before with Seagate hard drives and their included backup software where I was able to setup different backup schedules to back up various drive and file combos individually/separtely.
Here's what I would like to do on my new Mac Pro:
I have TIme Machine already setup to backup my OS X hard drive (internal #1) to external hard drive #1. that works fine.
I have a 2nd internal hard drive which i only want to use for FInal Cut Pro X media files (video and audio for various projects) and I would like to back that drive up to a different external hard drive.
I do not want to lump these files into the TM backup i have already setup for the OS on ext. drive #1. I want to keep a backup of my Final Cut media on external drive #2.
Any suggestions? How do video professionals usually backup their A/V drives individually and regularly (as I am sure most of you do not store your media on your OS drives).
Thank you!

There are software back up tools like Roxio's Retrospect, though many professionals use RAID systems with redundancy that automatically mirror their main media drive.

Don't have correct permissions to any drive other than the boot drive

I installed SL, and when it came time to enter in the user name, it said the name was already taken xxxx and so I entered yyyy. As an example.
Now User yyyy has Read / Write permissions for everything on Drive 1, the boot drive, but ALL of the other hard drives have xxxx as having Read / Write permissions, and not for my new account yyyy. So everytime I need to write a file to a hard drive, I have to fix permission for the folder the file resides in. This is getting old fast.
How can I change all my drives, folders, files, etc, etc to have yyyy permissions added without doing them 1 at a time?

what kind of backups? manual ones? then it's ok to do the following
select a drive and enter command+i. in the resulting popup, unlock the lock at the bottom, change the permissions as you want, then click on the "gears" action button at the bottom and select "apply to enclosed items".
However, let me stress here that you should NEVER EVER use "apply to enclosed items" on ANY system created folders, system drives or TM drives. that includes btw things like your home folder, your desktop folder etc. use it ONLY on folders you made yourself. using it on a system drive will have catastrophic results. using it on any system created folder will likely have highly unpleasant ones because such folders often have invisible ACLs and using this button will propagate them inside.

Will I lose Raided Drives if I wipe the boot drive?

Hey,
I'm having a couple different issues with my computer, so I'm hoping if I wipe down and zero out the boot drive and reinstall evrything back to the factory settings, some of the issues will be resolved.
I have two 500gb drives in the Mac Pro that are Raided together. I performed the raid through the disc utilities. I am wondering if I erase everything from the boot drive will it be able to reconize the Raid btw the two drives when it is restored, giving me acesss to everything saved on the raid.
Thanks very much!

RAID-ness is an attibute of the Drive, not the Mac, and not the boot drive.
If you took a RAID drive out and put it in another Mac running a similar Operating System, it would still be a RAID drive.
Rebuild your boot drive with confidence, it should have no impact on your RAID drives.

If I want to install Lions on a 2nd hard drive in my MacPro Desktop, will it allow me to do so if I have Leopard installed on the boot drive?

I have a blank 2nd hard drive that I am going to install in my MacPro desktop. The boot drive already contains the Leopard operating system. I want to install Lions on the blank hard drive. Will setup in Lions when it comes out, allow me to install Lions onto the 2nd hard drive since it should detect that I have a valid Apple operating system on the boot drive?

You can first install Snow Leopard then re-download Lion. Or you saved the original installer application then created a bootable Lion installer on a USB flash drive or DVD. Or you buy Apple's $69.00 USB flash installer.
You haven't told us what hindrances you've encountered, so you should post your own separate topic related to your problem and not threadjack another person's topic.

HT204416 My Safari is no longer working with many sites. However Chrome and Firefox work fine. I would like to re-install Safari in an effort to clear up the problem I can not resolve.

My Safari is no longer working with many sites. However Chrome and Firefox work fine. I would like to re-install Safari in an effort to clear up the problem I can not resolve.

1. From the Safari menu bar, select
Safari ▹ Preferences... ▹ Extensions
Turn all extensions OFF and test. If the problem is resolved, turn extensions back ON and then disable them one or a few at a time until you find the culprit.
2. Select
Safari ▹ Preferences... ▹ Privacy ▹ Remove All Website Data...
and confirm. Test.
3. If the above steps don't resolve the problem, please describe it in more detail.

I want to install an SSD as my OS drive. Can I do a copy of my existing drive straight the new drive?

I wish to install an SSD as my OS drive. I seem to recall in my travels that it is possible to copy my existing OSD, install the SSD, Copy old drive info' to new drive and then set that to be the boot drive.
Any directions to where I can find out how to do this would be greatly apprecciated. Providing this can be done.

TRIM Part 2
Trim on SSD Drives
When I first wrote this article/thread, which was for my own benefit and was eventually turned into this thread, as it is today, trim was not available on ssd drives, when it did arrive, there were mixed idea’s on how it worked, a lot that was incorrect at the time, a lot of new users do not understand the use of Trim even today, explanations tend to very technical as trim is a complicated issue at the best of times. I found a simple explanation for the implementation of trim in late 2009, I came across it again the other day, it still holds true today so here’s the link, ( I know you are going to point me to AnandTech explanations, there are links in this thread, if your a technically minded person, then AnandTech’s articles may be a better option ) this simpler explanation is still active in late 2011. As you can see if you carry on reading and don’t turn off, how complicated it can be for a non-technical user of ssd drives. So here’s my explanation of trim. Remember this a generalization of most ssd drives, it’s a lot easier when your dealing with your own ssd drive.
Trim and it’s association with GC ( garbage collection ) varies depending on how the controller’s "GC" handles the use of Trim ( Win7 ). Trim is activated, by deleting files in the OS ( Win7 ), it doesn’t actually trim the ssd drive, but marks the block/file header’s with a 1 making that block/file available for being re-written or written over. Trimming is actually done by the GC and will only work if the block doesn’t contain other files that haven’t been marked deleted, but this again depends on how GC is implemented, the GC can wait till the block is full, then move undeleted files to another block allowing for the block to be trimmed ( GC ), in doing this, the GC uses a lot more write amplification than it does if Trim in win7 has previously marked these blocks/files for deletion, flash memory can only be ‘written over’ if all the information in that block as been marked with 1, this allows the whole block to be re-written. GC can only erase/Trim a full block, not individual files or pages.
What trim does is mark these blocks/files etc and make it simpler for the inbuilt GC ( garbage collection ) to recognize the blocks that are available for further use, on some controller’s this will not necessarily happen immediately, it depends on whether the controller as been designed for “idle” use, “on the fly” use or “stand by use”, GC/Trim can be brought into use in many different ways, having the computer sitting with the bios open, having the computer idling at log in, placing the computer in stand by mode, deleting files or just simple idling the computer overnight. It’s a matter of finding out how the controller in your particular ssd handles the garbage collection. You will find the most efficient way is by experimentation or by other members passing on there particular way of doing it.
Low level formatting used on conventional HDD drives writes mainly 0’s to every cell on a SSD drive, it’s the opposite to how flash memory actually works, if you low level format with Win7 or any software that writes 0’s or 0’s and 1’s to the individual cells, you are not necessarily cleaning the ssd drive completely, ( hence the need for secure erase software ), you can actually make the performance worse.
If you use software designed for writing 1’s to each cell, like you would if it was designed for ssd drives, this will “clean” the drive and is a good thing to do if you are selling the drive, or as a last resort, if you are having problems with your ssd drive. The downside of using this type of erasure, is that it not only takes a long time it uses high write amplification and if used regularly can reduce the flash cells life expectancy considerably, these type’s of deletions bypass most controllers durawrite capabilities ( the way controllers extend the life expectancy of the ssd’s individual MLC cells ), Durawrite ( Sandforce ), other controllers have this technology in some form or other, it increases MLC life expectancy by between 5 and up to 30 times depending on the design of the controller.
Basically a command line program like dispart and dispar will secure erase a ssd drive either by writing to the individual ( “Cleanall“ command ) cells or simply marking the blocks to be deleted with a 1 ( “Clean” command ), you need to use the latter which takes only seconds and will return the majority of ssd's to a new state, without impacting too much on write amplification.
That’s how I see the use of GC and Trim in win7 today ( Nov 2011 ). Note! Most ssd software, tool boxes etc use the inbuilt win7 diskpart commands, to make it easier than using the command line. There is a explanation for the use of diskpart and can be found HERE, but NOTE! It’s written with conventional hard drives in mind, not ssd drives.
In the case of most Toolboxes provided by manufacturer’s, the OCZ Toolbox is a typical example, they are incompatible with Intel’s RST driver, you would need to use Diskpart from the command line. Also Toolboxes will in most cases, not secure erase a ssd with a OS on it or if the ssd drive is in use as the OS drive eg. ( “C:/” partition ). If you want to secure erase an OS drive you need to delete all the partitions on the drive including any hidden partitions, there’s an excellent tutorial on the Intel toolbox on LesT’s website, TheSSDReview here’s the Link.
You will have to use Diskpart or Diskpar from the Dos prompt, you can’t be in windows with the ssd drive you intend to erase. This is mainly if the toolboxes fail to work and deleting the partitions refuses to solve the problem.
I’m sure there are exceptions to what I have written and easier ways of explaining trim or secure erasing some types of ssd drives. All I ask is you don’t isolate passages out of context, please read the whole article, before you tell me I’m incorrect. There are a lot of more informative people out there than me on this subject, so I’m open to criticism on the subject. I want to impart only the correct facts on this thread.
Trim and the IDE issue The Intel IDE drivers after Vista sp2 are fully compatible with the trim command , but for trim to pass through this command, the ssd controller itself has also got to be compatible with IDE mode, eg. Intel drives with the Intel controllers are ( according to Intel ) fully compatible. The Crucial M4 appears not to be, other controllers optimized for AHCI may also not be compatible. I can’t comment on the Intel 510 as I’ve only ever used them in AHCI mode.
Wearlevelling Here’s an explanation that’s not too complicated, its from StorageSearch.com, here’s the LINK.
Overprovisioning Also from StorageSearch.com, a simple explanation for the need for overprovisioning, same link as above. This actual link covers a number of technologies used by the ssd controller in ssd drives. Overprovisioning improves write performance, if the ssd is used in a high write situation, increasing the overprovisioning will improve performance and write endurance, in a high read situation, too much can hinder performance, in a os situation the 7% supplied on client drives, in most cases is probably adequate depending on it’s use, if there’s a lot of writing done to the drive daily, reducing the partition size, which will increase overprovisioning, by a small amount may improve performance.
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showpost.php?p=3643482&postcount=1
Trimming SSD Performance Degradation
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Todays solid state drives are worlds apart from those of just 3 years ago, however they are not yet perfect. Performance degradation can still be observed through ‘seasoning’ of the SSD as well as filling it to capacity. SSD manufacturers have been successful in combating the effects of seasoning but performance degradation when an SSD is filled to capacity seems to be just a bit more difficult.
Typical testing of most drives, through use of random data, will result in an observable performance drop which may start as soon as the SSD is filled past the 70% mark. This article will describe the common characteristics of SSDs followed by a simple method to ensure that maximum performance is sustained with the drive.
SEASONING
Much has been said with respect to performance degradation as a result of the ssd becoming ‘seasoned’ over time. By ‘seasoned’, we mean that the drive will eventually use up all of its empty blocks of NAND, or memory and, without TRIM, the process of writing to a drive actually becomes that of reading the block of data, understanding that it is invalid, erasing and then writing rather than simply writing to a clean block. Performance is greater when writing to ‘clean’ memory vice memory which has previously been used and contains invalid data that has not been cleared. The root cause of degradation is that when a non-TRIM ssd is told to delete data, it actually only marks the area as clear which leaves the invalid data intact and tricks the ssd into believing that the NAND flash is available.
Data on a SSD cannot simply be over-written as it is done on a hard drive and this gets a bit more complicated when we erase information and the block that it is located on also contains valid information that we don’t want deleted. The process then becomes read data, recognize the valid information, move it to another clean block, erase the present block and write. Manufacturers have tried to combat this issue of performance degradation by creating 3 solutions to the problem which are wear leveling, TRIM and ITGC (or Garbage Collection).
Wear leveling
Wear leveling is the process of the ssd understanding how many times each cell of memory has been written to and then ensuring that all are all written to evenly. After all, the life span of the ssd is dependent on the total number of writes that are written to and this has been coined as ‘write endurance’. Unlike the hard drive which stores information in a static location, the SSD will move information around on a continuous basis without your knowledge to ensure that all cells wear evenly, thus affording a longer lifespan for the ssd. By also doing this, the drive can ensure that only the valid information is used, leaving blocks to be cleaned up by TRIM or ITGC, again without the knowledge of the user.
ITGC/GC (Idle Time Garbage Collection)
Garbage Collection (GC) is the process by which the SSD recognizes, in idle time, which cells are valid and which are not valid (or deleted) on the drive. It then clears the blocks of the invalid data to maintain the speed of writing to ‘clean’ pages or blocks during normal operation. GC was initially shown to be a last resort if TRIM was not available, however, recent releases are showing new methods to be very aggressive and results equal to that of TRIM are being observed. This is a huge benefit to those using RAID systems where Garbage Collection is accomplished as TRIM is not an option.
The SSD Review was able to discuss GC and TRIM with Crucial as it pertains to their SATA3 releases as it has been observed that their RealSSD C300 SATA3 drives do not appear to show any performance degradation over extended use. Crucial confirmed that they had to consider that TRIM would not pass through the present release of SATA3 drivers which helped recognize that very aggressive GC would be necessary for the C300 SATA 3 SSDs success. The subsequent result was that many forum threads were created by avid users who were questioning whether TRIM was, in fact, working in their SSDs as no performance degradation was seen even in the toughest of test beds. To dispel a common belief, it is not the Marvell processor of the Crucial RealSSD that prevents TRIM from being passed, but rather, that of the hardware and drivers of SATA3 capable motherboards. All Crucial SSDs are fully capable of passing TRIM direction to the OS.
TRIM
TRIM occurs when the ssd clears blocks of invalid data. When you delete a file, the operating system will only mark the area of the file as free in order to trick the system into believing the space is available. Invalid data is still present in that location. Its like ripping out a Table of Contents from a book. Without this, one would not know what, if anything, is contained on the following pages. TRIM follows the process of marking the area as free by clearing the invalid data from the drive. Without this, the process of reading, identifying invalid data, deleting or moving and clearing the block before writing can actually result in performance 4 times slower than it would have normally been as a new drive.
In recently speaking with Kent Smith, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for SandForce, he identified that there are many variables outside of the hardware that are responsible for users not seeing the benefits of TRIM, the first of which are drivers at the OS level which have to be working optimally in order for TRIM to function correctly. Another example occurred with early Windows 7 users testing their newly installed drives and not seeing the benefits of TRIM. Examination of these complaints revealed that users would have originally made the Windows 7 installation on hardware that did not support TRIM and then cloned to the SSD to which TRIM was supported but would not work because of the original configuration settings. The same could be said of cloning an OS that originally had AHCI turned off followed by a clone to the SSD where TRIM was not being passed, simply because AHCI has to activated for TRIM to function.
ENHANCE SSD OVER PROVISIONING MANUALLY
In our conversation, we breached the topic of SSD capacity to Mr Smith to which he replied, “Are you trying to optimize performance or maximize capacity?” which reminded us that the main purpose of the consumers transition to SSD was to maximize their system performance. Filling a drive to capacity will hinder TRIM and GC ability which will result in performance degradation. Many drives will start to display performance changes once filled to 70% capacity. Testing has shown that the user can very simply add to the drive, especially if it is a 7% over provisioned drive, by reducing the size of the partition, the new unallocated space of which will automatically be picked up as over provisioning and benefit the SSD in many ways. This idea has been tackled by Fusion IO who includes a utility within their products that allows the user complete control of the size of their over provisioning.
OWC 120Gb SSD With 16x8Gb NAND Flash = 128Gb Total (7% OP)
Over provisioning allows more data to be moved at one time which, not only enhances GC, but also reduces write amplification to the drive. Write amplification is a bit tricky of an explanation but it is the measure of how many bytes are actually written when requiring storage of a certain number of bytes. A ratio of 1:1 would be ideal but not a reality and a typical result would be an actual size of 40kb written for a typical 4kb file. In short, maximizing over provisioning and reducing write amplification increases the performance and lifespan of the drive. Over provisioning also provides for remapping of blocks should the bad blocks be discovered during wear leveling, which unlike a hard drive, does not reduce the end user capacity of the drive. The replaced blocks simply come from the over provisioning.
http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/ssd-performance-loss-and- its-solution/
Reducing the time GC takes
Increasing the amount of freespace available after a GC (which increases the time it takes for performance to degrade after a GC)
It lets the FTL have a wider selection of pages to choose from when it when it need a new page to write to, which means it has a better chance of finding low write count pages, increasing the lifespan of the drive
Now, I want to be clear, a sufficiently clever GC on a drive that has enough reserved space might be able to do very well on its own, but ultimately what TRIM does is give a drive GC algorithm better information to work with, which of course makes the GC more effective. What I showed above was a super simple GC, real drive GCes take a lot more information into account. First off they have to deal with more than two blocks, and their data takes up more than a single page. They track data locality, they only run against blocks have hit certain threshold of invalid pages or have really bad data locality. There are a ton of research papers and patents on the various techniques they use. But they all have to follow certain rules based on on the environment they work in, hopefully this post makes some of those clear.
http://www.devwhy.com/blog/2009/8/4/from-write-down-to-the-flash-chips.html

Why won't my Intel iMac boot up, either from the internal hard drive or the DVD drive? It just displays a light grey screen, without any other icons, etc. The fact that it won't boot from the original system DVD is what baffles me the most. Any ideas?

Why won't my Intel iMac boot up, either from the internal hard drive or the DVD drive? It just displays a light grey screen, without any other icons, etc. The fact that it won't boot from the original system DVD is what baffles me the most. Any ideas? It uses the latest version of Mavericks. Thanks!

If the C key for Install Disc or R Command for OS X Recovery startup commands are not working, try holding the Option key for the Startup Manager.
see > Startup Manager: How to select a startup volume
If that does not work and you using a wireless keyboard, it may have become unpaired and you need to dig up a USB keyboard to invoke the startup commands.
For more on gray screen, see > Mac OS X: Gray screen appears during startup

USB flash drive defined as boot device but not visible by the boot driver.

I have installed Mountain Lion (10.8.2) over Lion a few days ago. In the follow-up operations, I tried to create a USB flash drive recovery device, using methods widely advertised over the web. I first tried this with an 8 GB "Kingston DT 101 G2" device. The creation of the device either manually through the use of the Disk Utility or using a small utility called Lion DiskMaker 2.0.2 worked OK.
However, after setting the resulting device as the boot device through "System Preference", it never booted on it, but instead on the normal system disk. Conversely, when booting with the option key depressed, I could only see as option the normal system disk or its recovery partition, but never the USB flash drive, although it was present.
After numerous tests, through the so-called "trial and error" method, I eventually found out that I obtained perfectly bootable USB devices with either a generic device seen as "USB 2 USB Flash Drive" by the disk utility, or with a "Kingston Data Traveler G3" USB flash drive (both being 8 GB devices).
Now, I can understand that, for whatever reason, some USB devices, although formatted as boot devices, will not be seen by the boot driver. But, in such a case, it is a serious issue that "System Preference" accepts to set them as boot devices. I would suggest that "System Preference" tests whether the boot driver is able to see them and, if not, issues an error message instead of accepting them as boot device.
I also have an unrelated side question: when restoring a disk through the Disk Utility, is the resulting new volume defragmented and compacted by the process or not?

I can only tell you that some USB flash drives don't work as expected on Macs, and I don't believe it is specifically related to the product since they often work for others. I have five flash drives from a particular manufacturer that when plugged into one of my computers are not recognized, yet they are on all my other computers. I have six or seven older ones from the same manufacturer, same model, that work fine on all my computers. I have two Kingston Travelers that would not work as a bootable device on any of my computers. Many other users here have had issues with San Disk flash drives.
I don't know if this helps any, but at least you can know that you aren't alone.
One thing I can suggest is when you prepare a new flash drive that you go through this process:
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
This may fix boot problems with new flash drives because they are often prepared by the manufacturer with NTFS. To fully clear the drive you must both partition and format the device. Writing zeros has in some cases helped make a drive bootable when at first it was not.

I''m new to Mac, how do I install Adobe CD? I put it in the CD drive and get a menu, everything I click on goes nowhere. In Microsoft, I installed many programs with no problem

I''m new to Mac, how do I install Adobe CD? I put it in the CD drive and get a menu, everything I click on goes nowhere. In Microsoft, I installed many programs with no problem

Is the Adobe CD a MAC app ?
If it is a program for Windows you will not be able to install it.
If you nedd that program you can either buy the equivalent for Mac or install a way to run Windows under Mac (may be a cheaper solution)

HT3986 i installed win 7 on my mac book, and the sound driver was installed successfully, but i don't hear any sound, please help

i installed win 7 on my mac book, and the sound driver was installed successfully, but i don't hear any sound, please help

Is the volume muted? Click on the volume icon in the system tray to see if it shows as muted. If that's the case, I know of a workaround to fix this because if you unmute the speakers now, the condition will come back when you reboot your computer. I don't know the exact steps off the top of my head at the moment as I'm not in front of my machine. Check this first and reply if muting was the problem and I will detail the steps needed to fix the problem.

Does OS X throttle hard disk performance on the boot drive?

Does OS X throttle hard disk performance on the boot drive?
I was upgrading my boot drive on a Mac Pro (1,1) from the original Seagate 7200.9 250gb drive to a new Western Digital Caviar Black model 1tb drive.
What surprised me was that disk benchmarking tools (both AJ System Test and Xbench) showed that the new drive had a 30% decrease in speed tests (primarily writes) when actually serving as the boot drive. Put back in the original drive, and while not as extreme as the new drive, it also shows slower write speeds while serving as the boot drive vs serving as an extra internal drive.
In Xbench, the writes are both sequential and random unchached writes, AJ System test is less descriptive, but the write speeds on the new drive are painfully slow to watch.
Hardware-wise, I'd think this new WD
Is there something in the OS that impacts this? Is it something that can be tuned or tweaked? I feel like I'm not getting the most bang for my buck on the new drive (or the old for that matter).
That said, the new drive reads more than twice as fast as the old, and I can feel the difference significantly on boot up (login screen appears faster) and all my startup items load up much faster after logging in.

R C-R wrote:
Keep in mind that benchmarks don't really mean much unless test conditions are the same for each test. Benchmark each drive used as the boot drive & you get a relative comparison of their performance as a boot drive.
Which was really all I was after in the first place, and more as a curiosity than anything else, but it was just too unreal to see the drive lose half its read/write speed just because it was the boot drive. I'd expect, and accept, some relative drop in performance, but there seems like there was something wrong.
My problem gets stranger at this point. I was about to give up on using this drive, it was actually painfully slow to use and I'd gone back to my original drive. I thought I'd give it one more chance as part of some external drive enclosure stuff I was doing.
I put the drive back in Bay 1 on my Mac Pro, and it took forever to boot up, and when I ran benchmarks on it, they were only 5-10% of what I'd seen as a scratch drive, yes, that's 5% total. I actually got a score of 5.04 on Xbench. As a scratch drive, the thing gets in the 90's, and as boot drive it was getting 40s to 50s.
Anyways, after avoiding temptation to throw the thing against the wall, I tried putting it into an eSATA external dock, and booted from it. I am typing this from that boot session right now. The system booted up lightening fast, and benchmarks in Xbench are comparable to when it's a scratch drive, and AJA System Test just showed read/write speeds of 98 MB/s. This is what I would expect.
So now my issue appears to be that my Mac Pro, for some reason, is throttling, make that strangling, this particular hard drive when it is placed in Bay 1 and used as a boot drive. Some kind of hardware issue on the internal SATA bus? Incompatibility with this drive and Mac Pros? It's gonna take some more research or testing I guess.
Very frustrating. Reminiscent of my days with Beige Boxes running WindowsXP; certainly not the "it just works" experience I've grown to love since switching a few years ago.
I'll post back when I find out more.
Thanks again for the followup, and interestingly, I didn't get an email notification of an update to the thread. Odd.

Xserve not seeing boot drive

Wanting to make a cloned (carbon copy cloner) boot drive for our xserve. Mount a new drive - fromat it and then clone over the boot drive. Go to system preferences and start up disk and the new drive is shown as bootable. However the xserve will not start up from it - showing the flashing hard drive. Using the very latest Snow Leopard Server Software. ny ideas appreciated.

Run diskutil list and look at the partition map:
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS MacHD                   120.5 GB   disk0s2
Are you using GUID partition or does it say APM?   You may need to reformat the drive laying down a GUID map.
Just a guess

Installed a 2nd HD, how do I clone the orig. drive onto the new one...

Hi All,
just bought and installed a 700Gig second internal hard drive. i'd like to clone my orig. HD onto this new one, what do i use to do that?,

Hi-
If you haven't, first, use Disk Utility to format the new drive.
Once formatted, download SuperDuper! and clone the old drive to the new drive.
Then, change the Startup Drive selection in System Preferences, and restart. All done.
Before you erase the old drive, though, make sure everything on the new clone works as it should.
One thing that is good to do before a clone, is to boot to the OS install disk, and use Disk Utility to repair the hard drive (old drive) using the "Repair Disk" command. This is to correct any directory errors. Any errors on a drive that is cloned, will also be cloned, so this is good to do before a clone is performed.

Install Safari to a different hard drive, not the boot drive, on a Windows PC

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for