[X4U] Duplicating?

[John Baltutis]

On 12/18/08, Mark Des Cotes <lists at marksmandesign.ca> wrote:
> On 18-Dec-08, at 2:57 AM, John Baltutis wrote:
>
>> On 12/17/08, Mark Des Cotes <lists at marksmandesign.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>> I know I can't boot from a USB2 external drive. If I make a clone of
>>> my HD to the USB2 external drive using CCC, could I, if the need ever
>>> arises, take the drive out of it's enclosure put it in a FireWire
>>> enclosure and boot from it? Or do I have to make the clone directly
>>> to a FW drive?
>>
>> Why go through all of that when you can just pop the HD into a FW
>> enclosure and
>> leave it there. USB is significantly slower than FireWire.
>
> I have a iMac G5 and it only has FW 400 so USB2 is faster (at least I
> think it is). I already have a USB2 Dual enclosure with a RAID1
> setup. The drive is partitioned into two parts the first of which
> I've cloned my HD to. I'm just curious if the cloned HD would boot my
> iMac G5 if I removed the drive from the USB2 enclosure and put it in
> a FW enclosure. It's only for a worst case scenario. Should my HD
> ever fail I can run down to my local computer store and purchase a FW
> enclosure for the drive.

FW 400 is 40-50% faster than USB 2. Ext FW enclosures are relatively cheap. See
this one for example:
<http://www.macally.com/EN/Product/ArticleShow.asp?ArticleID=215>. Others are
at
<http://www.macally.com/EN/Product/?BigClassName=Drive%20Enclosures&SmallClassName=3.5 >
Since I don't have any USB ext HDs to experiment with, I can't tell you if a
USB created clone would boot a machine if put into an FW enclosure, but I doubt
it. Bottom-line on backups/clones: they're useless unless you boot with them
and test them. Waiting for your HD to fail and then finding out the
backup/clone won't work is worst than painful.