Upgrading hard drive

CookbookChef · Oct 10, 2007

I'm relatively new to the Mac world; I've been a pc user since mid-eighties, but made the jump earlier this year. Overall, I am very pleased with the decision, although it has been a struggle at times ;D . As a bonus, I work at M$, which leads to many interesting conversations.

When I bought my Mac Pro, I got it with just the basic memory and storage space. This weekend, the RAM gets upgraded to 8GB and I have an eye on getting a hard drive bigger than the standard drive 250GB that came with the computer. I am learning very quickly that editing video and audio files takes up a LOT of space.

I will admit right now that I am very much a beginner when it comes to the Mac (never used one before I bought it, never really saw one up close), but would be considered an expert in the Windows world.

The question: what is the easiest way to get the data from the current drive to a bigger one? Are there utilities for the Mac world that will do this for me? I don't really want to reinstall from scratch and I don't really like to leave my computer with someone to do it for me. I know that there are Windows-based utilities that will help with this, but I don't know if those utilities will work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Michael

cwa107 · Oct 10, 2007

CookbookChef said:
I'm relatively new to the Mac world; I've been a pc user since mid-eighties, but made the jump earlier this year. Overall, I am very pleased with the decision, although it has been a struggle at times ;D . As a bonus, I work at M$, which leads to many interesting conversations.

When I bought my Mac Pro, I got it with just the basic memory and storage space. This weekend, the RAM gets upgraded to 8GB and I have an eye on getting a hard drive bigger than the standard drive 250GB that came with the computer. I am learning very quickly that editing video and audio files takes up a LOT of space.

I will admit right now that I am very much a beginner when it comes to the Mac (never used one before I bought it, never really saw one up close), but would be considered an expert in the Windows world.

The question: what is the easiest way to get the data from the current drive to a bigger one? Are there utilities for the Mac world that will do this for me? I don't really want to reinstall from scratch and I don't really like to leave my computer with someone to do it for me. I know that there are Windows-based utilities that will help with this, but I don't know if those utilities will work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Michael

Welcome, Michael - you've happened upon an awesome forum here. Actually, as a Windows network admin (MCSE), I found myself in much the same position when I bought my first Mac. I knew nothing of OS X, very little of BSD (the UNIX-flavored foundation of OS X) and felt very lost despite the fact that I would consider myself an expert in all things Windows related.

One of the first utilities I started looking for was a disk imaging product. In the Windows world, I use Symantec's Ghost and Acronis TrueImage, but I found no equivalent for the Mac. Fortunately, the Mac actually doesn't require the same level of filesystem manipulation to clone a drive as a Windows machine does.

What I used for the same task was an excellent little piece of shareware/freeware called "SuperDuper". SuperDuper is actually intended to be used for regular full and incremental backups. But since it will set the destination drive as bootable, it can just as easily be used to clone a drive.

SuperDuper is shareware if you want the advanced features like incremental backups. But the basic version works quite well for doing a quick disk clone.

DSCole312 · Oct 10, 2007

Will you be replacing the existing 250GB drive, or adding the new drive in addition to it?

I'll most likely be getting a Mac Pro next month, and I'll probably be facing a similar scenario at some point... What I'll probably end up doing is keeping the Mac OS and Windows system files on the original 250GB drive, and then simply adding new drives as needed for additional storage.

By the way, a friend of mine just gave a big presentation at Microsoft.... Using his MacBook Pro. He says it felt good.

CookbookChef · Oct 10, 2007

I think what I would like to do is to make the new hard drive the main drive with OSX and Windows on it. That way I have plenty of room for both operating systems, and then move the 250GB drive to the secondary drive where I can put all of the stuff that I need to store long term; movies, photos, etc.

Is it possible to move the directory where iPhoto looks for photos? I take a LOT of pictures (of food, naturally) and if I can put those photos in a different location than the default, then that might prevent me from doing this entire exercise; I'll just move the photos to the new drive.

Upgrading hard drive

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DSCole312

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