DMD65

Q: Concerning using two drives in a MacBook Pro

I have installed a new SSD and placed the old Hard Drive in the Optical Bay. Prior to that, I had cloned the disk to the SSD. Now and after installation, the only thing is that when I boot from the SSD, the computer still shows the SSD start up disk as device in the side bar while the old hard drive is shown in the sidebar as the main Hard drive. It is obvious that the active disk, system are used from the SSD though. The Terminal starts from the name of the old disk even though it lists the contents of the Applications on the SSD when I ls.

Now, I wanted to erase the old HDD while booted in SSD. Disk Utility cannot unmount the disk, it says and quit the reformatting task. I tried the Recovery Hd too, the same result.

Now my questions are :

1. Do we have a conflict at the level of structure somewhere? A permanent link or what si it I am missing?

2. Can I safely erase, reformat the old hard drive and will the finder finds its path to the structure on the SSD?

Or what is I have missed?

I am on Lion (10.7.5).

MacBookPro 15-inch, early 2011

Grateful for your feedback or any suggestion.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Nov 21, 2015 8:56 PM

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Q: Concerning using two drives in a MacBook Pro

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  • by Duane,

    Duane Duane Nov 21, 2015 9:24 PM in response to DMD65
    Level 10 (124,018 points)
    Nov 21, 2015 9:24 PM in response to DMD65

    If you cloned the old drive to the SSD, the spotlight index on the SSD probably points to all the items on the old drive. You probably should force spotlight to reindex the drives.

     

    Also... if you haven't done it already, rename one of the drives so they do not have the same name.

     

    You can erase the old drive. It wouldn't be any different than if you cloned the drive and then never used the old drive again.

  • by FishingAddict,

    FishingAddict FishingAddict Nov 21, 2015 9:25 PM in response to DMD65
    Level 4 (1,586 points)
    Mac OS X
    Nov 21, 2015 9:25 PM in response to DMD65

    Did you set the startup disk in "System Preferences" > "Startup  Disk"?

  • by DMD65,

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 21, 2015 10:37 PM in response to Duane
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 21, 2015 10:37 PM in response to Duane

    Yeas I had already selected the SSD as the startup Disk and I had also renamed the old HDD, before asking this question. It didn't help...

  • by DMD65,

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 21, 2015 10:56 PM in response to DMD65
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 21, 2015 10:56 PM in response to DMD65

    Now I re-selected the SSD as the start up because it crossed my mind that I had selected but left the window unlocked and that maybe have some significance. I locked it and I erased the Hdd successfully.

    However, the sidebar shows this hierarchy:

    the device on the top is the name of my old Hard drive. I am sure I am missing something here.

    Screen Shot 2015-11-22 at 14.47.41.png

  • by DMD65,

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 21, 2015 11:01 PM in response to DMD65
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 21, 2015 11:01 PM in response to DMD65

    And by the way, Spotlight does find folders and files on the SSD. Works fine.

  • by DMD65,

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 21, 2015 11:27 PM in response to DMD65
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 21, 2015 11:27 PM in response to DMD65

    Please ignore the question in the second reply above (10:56 PM). Everything does work as it is, I think. Most probably, the problem was the unlocked window in the System Preferences.

    And I have to say that the speed of this new disk is beyond my expectations! Thank you for your replies.

  • by Duane,

    Duane Duane Nov 22, 2015 6:24 AM in response to DMD65
    Level 10 (124,018 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 6:24 AM in response to DMD65

    DMD65 wrote:

     

    Now I re-selected the SSD as the start up because it crossed my mind that I had selected but left the window unlocked and that maybe have some significance. I locked it and I erased the Hdd successfully.

    However, the sidebar shows this hierarchy:

    the device on the top is the name of my old Hard drive. I am sure I am missing something here.

    Screen Shot 2015-11-22 at 14.47.41.png

     

    Is "DMD1" the name that you are concerned about? It is the name of your MacBook Pro. To change that, visit System Preferences -> Sharing.

  • by DMD65,Solvedanswer

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 22, 2015 7:03 AM in response to Duane
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 7:03 AM in response to Duane

    Dear Duane, thank you. I know. Actually I wrote my reply too fast but couldn't edit or delete it for some reason, that is why I sent another reply asking to ignore that point.

    In fact, everything works really fine. I have new questions about other things, for instance, if I can place the ~/Library on the second disk with a symbolic link on the start up disk, but it is perhaps more appropriate to ask this question in a separate post.

    So far at the beginning, it is fast and my MBP has got a new life. The stability of SSD, compared to HD,remains to be examined…

  • by Duane,

    Duane Duane Nov 22, 2015 7:09 AM in response to DMD65
    Level 10 (124,018 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 7:09 AM in response to DMD65

    Why do you want to relocate ~/Library? seems like an odd item to relocate.

  • by DMD65,

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 22, 2015 7:36 AM in response to Duane
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 7:36 AM in response to Duane

    I read about SSD being sensitive to much writing and re-writing. Library contains files that are often modified (specially Mail is a good candidate), so I figured out it'd better to add Library or at least ~/Library/Mail to the HDD and create a link (Alias) on the SSD. This said, Library in the Home folder has some new features in terms of permissions (it is since Lion invisible if you don't change the flagging). So I am unsure if this is a good idea. Any suggestion?

  • by Duane,

    Duane Duane Nov 22, 2015 8:21 AM in response to DMD65
    Level 10 (124,018 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 8:21 AM in response to DMD65

    This is completely opposite logic as to why you should install an SSD. The reason to install an SSD is to make things read/write faster than when using a HD. If you put the most frequently accessed/modified on a HD you are negating the advantage of the SSD.

     

    Realize that Apple is installing SSD drives in their laptop and no HD. This is because there is no problem reading and writing often to the SSD.

  • by DMD65,

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 22, 2015 8:54 AM in response to Duane
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 8:54 AM in response to Duane

    On this point you seem to be right and I misled by some excessive cautious attitude towards a technology that is still relatively new (mass implementation is not longer than three years and the new and more voluminous ones, like mine (500gb), are even newer). I just want to treat it  in a way that doesn't wear it off too fast. But my concerns are admittedly illogical. What else should I then think about using Solid State compared to a HDD? What about TRIM and what about fragmentation?

  • by Duane,

    Duane Duane Nov 22, 2015 11:57 AM in response to DMD65
    Level 10 (124,018 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 11:57 AM in response to DMD65

    DMD65 wrote:

     

    ...

    What about TRIM and what about fragmentation?

    OS X takes care of that.

  • by DMD65,

    DMD65 DMD65 Nov 22, 2015 7:23 PM in response to Duane
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Nov 22, 2015 7:23 PM in response to Duane

    Dear Duane

    Thanks for your reply.

    For SSD and the issue of writing and re-writing, I quote Wikipedia (perhaps not the most reliable reference and it is a quite general statement):

    "An SSD write operation can be done on a single page but, due to hardware limitations, erase commands always affect entire blocks;[10] consequently writing data to empty pages on an SSD is very fast, but slows down considerably once previously written pages need to be overwritten."

     

    The same source says the following about TRIM:

    "Although the AHCI block device driver gained the ability to display whether a device supports the Trim operation in 10.6.6 (10J3210),[32] the functionality itself remained inaccessible until 10.6.8, when the Trim operation was exposed via the IOStorageFamily and filesystem (HFS+) support was added.[citation needed] Until 10.10.4, Mac OS X natively enabled Trim only for Apple-branded SSDs; third-party utilities are available to enable it for other brands. Old third party TRIM drivers stopped working as of the Yosemite update.[33] Updated drivers now exist that work with OS X Yosemite.[34][35] In Mac OS X update 10.10.4, Apple added a command line utility, trimforce, that can be used to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs"

    I am working in Lion (10.7.5), and the quotation seems to support what you are saying even though the information provided is too brief and sketchy.

     

    Couldn't find much Macosx specific information on the net about fragmentation.