Greetings, I have upgraded a friends iMac to 10.3.4, and they have run out of room on the internal drive... (6GB) They are very scared about the thought of starting over with a new HD, since everything works... And I can't blame them. So, I suggested a CDRW, OK done, but they want to store lots of MP3's and such, in addition to backups... I want to get them an external USB HD.
I know it's gonna be slow, it's just for storage - and accessing music.
I have never run into this issue before, as I mostly work with towers and Firewire capable macs... So I need arguements to convince them to upgrade their HD, or options I can tell them about - external drives... I understand that you can find USB 2.0/1.1 enclosures cheap, and I have many drives to plop into them...
Any issues known about using a USB 2.0/1.1 enclosure on an iMac as an external drive?
Cheers!
There is no problem with using usb 1.1, but it will be slow... seems like it would not be a problem in this case. I have used a usb 1.1 drive on my 333 imac and it works just fine.
That "scared about changing because everything works" is BS. If you use Apple Software Restore to clone the contents of the current drive to a partition on the new drive, nothing should break. Just remember that the first partition on the new drive needs to be 8GB or less.
AF members know that but the average user has fears about such things, and they're not always baseless. I've had a few drive clonings fubar and had a huge pain with recovery and I usually know what I'm doing. Still a new drive would be the best solution. You can get almost any 40-160GB drive for under $100 if you time it correctly
As for the interface have you thought about setting them up with a low end NAS? The cost on those have been droping and they can be really useful. It also might be a little faster than a USB solution.
A new drive would be so much faster they'd likely think they have a faster iMac. So I'd likely format and partition a new hard drive then clone the contents of the old hard drive onto it and install the new drive into their iMac. Then let them stash the old one as backup.
If they're afraid, tell them that you can reinstall their old hard drive any time they want.
Wayne
Like g3head said, it can be messed up, sometimes even if you follow the directions correctly. ASR will eather work great, or be an absolute time waster. Making an image alone takes about 1-2 hours, and if it doesn't work, you have to make another... and another... I would rather use an external usb drive, then bust my brain with ASR.
I usually use ASR to clone disks and have only had excellent results. However I recently noticed OS9's Disk Copy and OSX's Disk Utility have similar functions, "Clone" in DC and "Restore" in DU. Haven't tried 'em myself, anyone able to comment?
Also, cloning can be of/to a partition, not just an entire drive.
Dan K