Hard drive upgrade advise needed

i have four 750GB drives setup as two RAID 1 sets. one is the boot drive and one set it storage. i want to upgrade to four 2TB in the same config.
what's the quickest, painless way to upgrade and transfer data? i dont want to start from scratch, just transfer user account with all data
Message was edited by: Simon Benus

The hatter wrote:
Do one set at a time.
You really should already have a full backup now on external drive.
If not then add a WD 2TB or maybe 1.5TB ($109).
Like I said, two backup sets as minimum before anything else, and only then venture into mirror RAID - which I don't think is necessary or great idea.
RAID0 for performance, and first cover all bases with backups.
Backup.
Pull the mirror set and keep off line - SAFE!
Create new RAID (if you must)
Test each drive first by itself.
Then test the array.
Then clone/restore from your backup.
You SHOULD have an external drive set, maybe Sonnet E4P and dual drive case.
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata2me4e.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/SATA2ME4E/
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata2en2.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/SATA2EN2/ (hot swap, tray)
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/SATA5PM/
Dual drive, not hot swap, cheap but handles two SATA drives for less:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MESATATBEK/
Sonnet E4P
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technology/TSATAIIE4P/
I'd say you didn't have a good backup plan up until now...
thanks for the tip. i do have a 2tb external as a time machine backup

Similar Messages

Need help picking the correct hard drive upgrade for my MBP

I need help picking the correct/best hard drive upgrade for my MBP. It is the 15" 2GHz Core Duo. Came with a spacious 90GB drive.
Suggestions and recommendations very appreciated.

It will take almost any 2.5 inch sata drive.
Take a look at www.newegg.com and www.macsales.com to see what's out there and how much it costs.
Toshiba have a 320gb 2,.5 inch drive in the works, but it's not quite out yet and will be expensive.
I'll start you off..
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=380&name=Laptop-Hard-Dr ives

How much hard drive do I need on the Macbook Pro?

I am buying a Macbook Pro 13" to use for email, internet, word processing and photo editing (in raw and jpeg). It comes wtih 500 or 750 GB Seriesl ATA hard drive which is way more hard drive than I need. I will keep most of my photos on an external hard drive and in a cloud and retain about a thousand photos on the Macbook's hard drive at a time for viewing and processing. I would like to upgrad to the Solid State hard drive but want to choose the least amount of hard drive that would be sufficient for the applications I would like to run and the realtively small amount of photos I want to store on the Macbook Pro. Do you think this would be sufficient? Is the solid state hard drive so much better than the serieal ata hard drive that it would be a good investment?

The downside of moving a lot of your storage to an external hard drive is that then you need a second external hard drive on which to back the first one up, and you need to remember to actually DO the backups regularly. I greatly prefer to have a large enough internal drive to store all my files, just because it makes backing them all up so much easier (and therefore more likely to be done often).
As for the downside of SSDs, do they need any more downside than costing several times more per GB of storage than hard drives? Particularly when they're still in their early childhood, are still improving by leaps and bounds, and better SSDs will probably cost half or less than half as much per GB a year from now as they do today? There's more than enough downside to discourage me from buying an SSD now. Thanks, but I'll wait for prices to come down, sizes to increase, the limited-write-cycles problem to be addressed on Macs, and SSDs' long-term reliability to be more definitively confirmed. And frankly, I just don't care whether a file takes half a second or three seconds to open. I can afford to wait 20 or 30 seconds a day.

Hard Drive Upgrade - Incorrect Capacity Shown In Disk Utility After Installation

I have an older model Macbook Version 2.1 that had an 80GB hard drive installed. I have just installed a Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB internal hard drive upgrade and successfully cloned my data over using Carbon Copy Cloner. The problem I have encountered is that only 98.1GB of capacity is shown in Disk Utility for the new hard drive. After starting the computer using my bootable copy via an external USB drive, I formatted the newly installed 500GB drive with the appropriate Apple formatting (e.g. GUID and Mac OS Extended Journaled) but it only shows 98.1GB of space available on the new drive. I was able to successfully clone the information from my bootable back-up of the old drive to the new drive but I just don't have the full 500GB capacity available to me.
What should I do? Is this a problem with the new hard drive or is there something I need to change on my Macbook to "see" the whole capacity of my new drive?
Thanks for your advice,
Dave

Hi Andrew,
When I formatted the new drive did it with 1 partition and it displays a TOTAL of 98.1GB free space (both in Disk Utility and About This Drive). As far as I can tell, the Macbook is treating the new WD drive as if it is only a 98.1GB drive rather than the 500GB drive that it is.
Thoughts?
Dave

Time Machine confused after iMac hard drive upgrade

Here's the deal. I had my 24" iMac internal 250-gig hard drive upgraded to a 1-Terabyte drive. Tech guy cloned them with SuperDuper. New drive booted right up and works great. My question is regarding Time Machine, which I have set up to backup to an external drive. I assumed because old drive was cloned to new drive, Time Machine would think it was the same drive and just keep backing it up as it always has. But what happens is Time Machine just keep saying "processing" and nothing ever happens.
Is there a way to tell TM to start backing up the new drive as it always did or do I need to delete my current (1 1/2 yr. old) TM files and let it start from scratch again? I really don't want to do that. Any ideas?

As V.K. says, that procedure may or may not work.
The reason for the long preparing stage is that TM, seeing a different drive, is examining every file and folder on your system, and may do a full backup of your entire system.
Download the +Time Machine Buddy+ widget. It shows the messages from your logs for one TM backup run at a time, in a small window. You'll probably see a message about a UUID error referencing your internal drive --that means TM doesn't recognize it as the same one it last backed-up.
Then you'll probably see one about a "deep traversal." That means TM is looking at every file and folder on your system to see what needs to be backed-up. This takes quite a while, of course, and you won't see anything being backed-up (xx MB of yy GB) until it's done.
If TM does perform a full backup, it may have to delete a lot of your old backups to make room for the new one. If it can't delete enough, it will fail.

Spinning beach ball after hard drive upgrade

Im running a macbook pro i7 2.2ghz 8gb ram version 10.6.8 SL
I recently upgraded my 128gb ssd to a 512gb ssd drive. I cloned the drive to new drive and ever since then, I get the spinning beach ball very often whereas I never got it prior to the hard drive upgrade. Is there anything I can check or do to eliminate the freeze ups? It is VERY annoying. Or do I just need to do a fresh install on the new hard drive.
thanks in advance

Did you properly prep the drive first:
Drive Preparation
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
If you are preparing an external or a non-startup drive, then 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. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, 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. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. 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 Options 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.

Hard Drive Upgrade in Vista

I have an IBM T60p with original 90 gig HD. I spent a weekend trying to upgrade to a larger capacity drive. Downloaded several commercial programs. None of them worked properly. I finally found a way to use Vista to complete the task. This procedure works, have a new 320 gig WD 7200 RPM drive working correctly in my computer. Hard drive Upgrade in Windows Vista
This procedure was used on an IBM ThinkPad T60p with 90 gig SATA HD.Machine was upgraded with a Western Digital 320 gig BEKT SATA drive (Scorpio Black).
Before you start:You need to change the BIOS setting for Windows to recognize your new drive.
Reboot and enter BIOS
Select “Config” => Serial ATA (SATA) => SATA Controller Mode Option: => COMPATIBILITY
Save and exit
Review Boot priorities to enable the Boot from CD option
Have a copy of Windows Vista on CD; the version does not matter, you will use this only to boot from CD.
See WD product description at following website
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=477
You will need an external USB hard drive to back up your existing hard drive.
It needs to be large enough to back up your existing drive.
Plug in the drive, Windows should recognize it.
Format the external hard drive so it is clean.
Backup Existing Drive
Back up drive C to the external drive using Windows Vista.
Go to Control Panel => Backup and Restore Center
Select the “Back-up files or your entire computer” option
Select “Back up computer
”Windows displays “Where do you want to save the backup”
Select “On a hard disk”
Windows displays hard drives available,
Select the drive you just plugged in
Click “Next”
Review the screen “Confirm your backup settings”
Windows displays “Local Disk (C) (System)” in the bottom window.
Click “Start backup”.
Backup will take 1-2 hours.
When completed, you have a complete image of your drive created by Windows Vista on the external HD
Install new Hard Drive
Shut down the machine.
Install the new hard drive per manufacturer instructions.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-62826
Boot the computer using the Vista CD.
Once files are loaded, Vista will open
Click “Next”
Click “Repair Your Computer”
Windows displays a window showing operating systems available, the window will be blank.
Click “Next”
Windows displays “Choose a Recovery Option”
Select “Windows Complete PC Restore”
Windows displays the saved image from your external drive
Click “Next”
Windows displays the restoration information
Click “Finish”
Remove the Windows CD
Restore will take 1-2 hours
Set up the new drive
After restoration, the system will reboot and you should be at the Vista Log In screen.
Log in normally and check to be sure your programs work.
You now need to tell Vista you have a new drive, and resize the partition to the capacity of the new drive.
Tell Windows to recognize the new drive
Start Menu, L click “Computer”
Drive C displays the stored image with the same capacity of the old drive.
R click on drive C => properties
Select the “Hardware” tab
Highlight drive C
Select the “Properties” tab, bottom right
Click on “Change settings”, bottom left
Click on the “Volumes” tab
Click the “Populate” tab
Windows will now populate the table with the settings for the new drive.
Save the settings and Reboot the computer.
Windows will now recognize the new higher capacity drive.
After reboot
Start Menu, R click “Computer”
Select “Manage”
In the L window, select “Storage” => “Disk Management”
Disk “0” is your new drive
Select Drive C
R click Drive C, select “Extend Volume”
The Extend Volume Wizard will open
Click “Next”
Click “Finish”
The new drive capacity is now operational.
You will now have two partitions, one for Windows, one for programs and data.

I'm also interested if anyone knows. I called the Square Group in London (Nex Oxford Street) but they said they'd get back to me ... but they didn't ...

MacBook Pro2012 : How can you get hard drive upgraded in Netherlands without losing warranty?

My MacBook Pro (2012) hard drive is almost full, Apple refuses to provide hard drive upgrade service, how can you get hard drive upgraded in Netherlands without losing warranty?

Dear Ralph, and All
My MBP is indeed non-retina.
I also have Apple care support for 3 years
I was in touch with Apple suport since last week. Response I got on Phone was pretty astounding (waiting email confirmation). They say following
- Apple support does not provide such service of upgrading hard drive
- Doing it yourself means you will lose warranty (due to nature of operation one would need to perform on the computer)
- None of authorised delars will provide such a service
So as such there apparantly is no way to get your hard drive upgraded without losing warranty.
Leaves me a bit perplexed
I do understand MBP retina (or iPAD / iPhones) are manufactured in way that makes it technically impossible to upgrade certain parts. But why non-retina MBP?
What do you all think? is this reasonable? is this what a MBP customer would expect?
Really appreaciate the quick responses i have recieved from you and others on this forum.
Many thanks
Tirath Shah

How can I browse T.M. backups made BEFORE internal hard drive upgrade?

Hi, all. I have googled and googled with no info on my particular situation. Maybe one of you can help. Here's hoping...
I have a MacBook Pro and use Time Machine to back up to a Firewire hard drive. I do not back up my System and Applications, just files. Consequently, when I recently upgraded my internal hard drive I restored all my data and settings from the original internal hard drive (not the Time Machine).
From there Time Machine began making NEW backups of the NEW hard drive, no problem, but I cannot browse the backups of the previous internal hard drive. Is there any way I can get Time Machine to recognize all of these backups as existing from the same machine and let me browse back beyond the internal hard drive upgrade?
Any help is greatly appreciated!

I think you have to browse them separately, but you should be able to do so by right-clicking (control+click) on the Time Machine icon in the dock or by holding the option key when clicking the icon in the menu bar.
Choose "Browse other Time Machine Disks" and you should see the old series of backups.
~Lyssa

IMac G3 hard drive upgrade

I have an iMac G3:
- slot-load
- 350MHz
- 128MB RAM
- 6GB hard drive
The computer was making a loud noise, which I believed to be the hard drive. I removed the hard drive and connected it externally and it made the same loud noise. I want to replace the hard drive, and I have an unused 120GB 3.5" drive I want to use in my iMac.
My question is, do I need to partition it less than 8GB? Or is that only for the tray-loading iMacs? When I insert the new blank hard drive, do I need to install Mac OS 9 or can I just insert my Mac OS 10.3 Panther disc?
Thanks.

You don't need a partition under 8GB for your iMac. You're right. That's for tray loaders.
You can install Panther without OS9.
Make sure the drive is set "Master". Check the drive manufacturer's web sit for the jumper configuration if you have questions.
If the drive doesn't show up, boot from your Panther disk and use Drive Setup to initialize the new drive.
David

I have a new mini mac and i want to use my existing external hard drive but it needs to be reformated how do i do this without loosing all my old photos?

i have a new mini mac and i want to use my existing external hard drive but it needs to be reformated how do i do this without loosing all my old photos?

Formatting will erase the drive.
You need to copy the photo's to either your old computer, the Mac Mini or to a new external drive and then decide what to do with your existing external drive.
For example: You could use one External drive for Photo's and one external drive for Time Machine to backup both your Mac Mini and the Photo drive.

How big a hard drive do I need for iMac and Time Machine?

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere already. I am going to buy an iMac, probably the new 24" with a 320G internal HDD. I already have one Lacie external 320G HDD so I was wondering whether I can use this for Time Machine backups, or do I need to buy a bigger one? If so, how big? Is there a rule of thumb for working out how much hard drive space you need to have for Time Machine, for instance if I were to buy the 500G iMac what would I need?
thanks.

I agree with the "double the size" rule of thumb. You should also consider how much of the 320GB you are actually using and are likely to use in the next year or two. After all, it's the amount of storage you use that matters, not the size of the disk. Disks will very likely be cheaper soon. You should also keep in mind that TM deletes old archive data when it runs out of disk space. So as long as you have more disk space than you have data to back up, TM will work, though you will lose older versions of your data.
So if your 320GB drive only has 100GB used and you're not the kind of person who eats up disk like there's no tomorrow, the 320GB drive should be fine for now. If you expect that 320GB disk to be full soon then a 750GB TM disk is more like what you need.
The same logic applies to a 500GB iMac. If you only expect to use 250GB in the next year or two then a 500GB TM disk should be OK. A 1TB drive will be a lot cheaper next year or the year after.

I have over 200 hours of HD video on 5 different TB Thunderbolt GRaid hard drives. I need to reorganize my projects, moving large files from one drive to another. Advice?

I have over 200 hours of HD video on 5 different TB Thunderbolt GRaid hard drives. I need to reorganize my projects, moving large files from one drive to another. Advice?

Do some testing to get your method working right with some less than important footage.
Copy/paste files where you want then.
Use the FCE Reconnect feature to tell FCE where the newly copied files reside.
Make sure the new location and files are working as expected with your Projects.
Delete the original files if no longer required.
Al

Hard Drive upgrade

I'm considering a hard drive upgrade but i dont know crap about them. I went over to newegg because i heard it was a good site and found this one......
"Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000LPVT 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive"
The only problem is, I dont know wheter it is compatible with my Early 2009 13 inch macbook pro..... Should I go with this one or are there better ones out there? I'm not really worried about price. I was aiming to get a 500gb. Thanks.

It is compatilbe if it's a 2.5" notebook SATA II 3.0 Gb/s model. Take Csound1's advice. If you buy a WD drive or any other makers' drives do not purchase any "green" drives as they don't work well in Macs.
If you want better performance get a drive rated for 7200 RPM with as large a cache as possible (typically 16 MBs.) Other makers to consider include Hitachi, Seagate, and SamSung.
If you want faster speed consider the Seagate XT500 hybrid. Or visit OWC and look into their DataDoubler that enables you to replace the optical drive with an SSD (or another HDD.)

My iTunes is running from my external hard drive because I need to make space on my C drive. Could/should I delete the music on the C drive?

My iTunes is running from my external hard drive because I need to make space on my C drive. Could/should I remove the music from the C drive?

Hello Willlig
If iTunes media is taking up a good majority of space on your computer, you can move it by following the steps in the article below.
iTunes for Windows: Moving your iTunes Media folder
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1364
Regards,
-Norm G.

Hard drive upgrade advise needed

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for