Snow Leopard 101: For Smart People Only

[Alexander Kallas]

[David Roth Weiss] “BTW, before installing your new software, be sure to test your clone make certain it is indeed bootable by booting to it via Startup Disk in System Preferences. I’ve had 99.9% success, but that once I screwed-up and that cost me a lot of time. “

….care to tell us what went wrong?

Cheers
Alexander

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Mark Petereit] “I plan on wiping out a spare external drive and using it to create disk images of all my install disks. According to Torrey Loomis at Silverado, it cuts install time of FCP3 from 4 hours to about 24 minutes. “

That’s exactly what I do. It is such a time saver. When you have to install the suite across mulitple machines, there’s no better way.

Jeremy

[David Roth weiss]

[Alexander Kallas] “….care to tell us what went wrong? “

That one time I didn’t erase the hard drive, which had a previous clone onboard, and for some reason that botched the cloning process and it made a clone that would not boot.

Today, the newest versions of both CCC and SuperDuper automatically erase the drive or partition before creating the bootable clone, thus circumventing that issue before it happens.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Also, depending on the program, there’s a check mark that says something to the effect of ‘Make Clone bootable?”. Make sure that’s checked.

Jeremy

[Bob Cole]

[Winston A. Cely] “I, for one, am planning on getting a brand spanking new 10k RPM drive (Western Digital Raptor), to install everything from the ground up in my Mac Pro”

This sounds like a great idea.

Winston, how did you select this drive? Reliability is of course even more important than speed (though 10k sounds great). I’ve looked at the customer reviews on NewEgg, but that isn’t too helpful because every single drive seems to have failed at some point. I’ve googled this, and been disappointed by the survey sites.

So, are there GENERAL rules of thumb for HD reliability, e.g. number of platters, heat generation, size, speed?

At any rate, upping the capacity and speed of my system drive would take a lot of the pain out of doing a proper shift to Snow Leopard, as Dr. Weiss would approve.

Bob C

[David Roth weiss]

[Bob Cole] “upping the capacity and speed of my system drive would take a lot of the pain out of doing a proper shift to Snow Leopard, as Dr. Weiss would approve.”

Bob,

See the link below… Newegg has the 300Gb Velociraptor 10K RPM drive for just $199 after $30- rebate.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136322

And, why concern yourself with reliability??? You can’t go wrong if you simply clone the darn thing to a cheap firewire drive after installing it. Right? All you’d need to think about, even in a worst case scenario, would be the drive’s warranty.

Good luck,
Your pal David
(who still remains shocked ever since you confided that you have never ever cloned your system drive)

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Bob Cole]

[David Roth Weiss] “who still remains shocked ever since you confided that you have never ever cloned your system drive”

Huh? I’ve done it — way too rarely, of course. When I upgrade to SL, I’ll be doing the regular Time Capsule/CCC routine: Time Capsule backups every day, system drive clones once a week or so.

But reliability is still crucial; even losing a morning’s work would stink.

Thanks for the recommendation. I should have said that I was thinking of getting more like 500 gb for the system drive.

Bob C

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bob Cole] “Thanks for the recommendation. I should have said that I was thinking of getting more like 500 gb for the system drive. “

I put in a couple of the Western Digital 1TB drives in a few of our machines. Just the off the shelf 7200 RPM “Green units” they sell at Frys, Best Buy and others. Only $90 now so it’s too cheap not to.

I really don’t see the need for a 10,000 RPM drive just to run my system, not going to see any noticeable performance difference between 7200 and 10,000 for that. For media arrays maybe, but not a system drive.

https://www.macmall.com/ttsvr/p/Western-Digital-Internal-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~7674504~pdp.fbaiceh

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
Credits include multiple Emmy, Telly, Aurora and Peabody Awards.
Owner, Biscardi Creative Media featuring HD Post
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[David Roth weiss]

[Bob Cole] “I should have said that I was thinking of getting more like 500 gb for the system drive. “

500gb was not available at Newegg for some reason.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Winston A. cely]

I’ve actually already got the drive, wiped it, and reinstalled just the apps I need for work. I have noticed a difference between this drive and the previous 7200 drive I was using. Startup is noticeably quicker, opening apps and Finder windows is MUCH quicker, along with searches, previews and others tasks of that nature. I haven’t had the chance yet to see if there’s any difference in the pro apps yet.

As for how I picked, I knew I wanted a faster drive, so I started there, but for me it really comes down to the real world reviews. I’ll first use something like CNET to get a few drives to look at, but then I’m looking at personal product reviews and go from there.

BTW, I did get the Velociraptor from Newegg. I’m loving it.

Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLC

Mac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe

“If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling allusion it has been mastered.” – Stanley Kubrick