Carbon Copy Cloner what external hard drive do you use

Question

growler62000 Author

Level 2

196 points

Carbon Copy Cloner what external hard drive do you use

For 4 years, I have used USB 3.0 to connect to Seagate STDR1000102 1TB Backup Plus Slim Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive.

I read somewhere, maybe was on this forum, don’t recall, that it is not necessary to get a Thunderbolt 2 XHD since the faster speed would be wasted.

Now that I have upgraded from Mohave to Catalina, my CCC XHD needs to be erased & reformatted to APFA. CCC timed out & that is the instruction from CCC.

The CCC website states: “If your destination device is an HDD with a rotational speed of 5400RPM (or slower): (e.g. "Slim" backup devices, 2.5" disks) APFS is not designed for these devices, macOS boot performance may be poor.” Basically tells me I cannot use such a slow drive for a bootable clone.

I called Seagate to ask what the RPM is on my XHD & they said RPM is proprietary info! For all XHDs.

I really doubt the RPM on this slim style XHD is 7200 RPM. It may even be slower than 5400 RPM.

My main use of the CCC clones is in the event of HD failure or stolen or damaged Mac, I want to be up & running again fast.

I’m considering purchasing “SAMSUNG T5 Portable SSD 1TB” which CCC website lists among their tested XHDs that work very well.

I’m not sure I understand what is meant by “boot performance may be poor.”

If you have a too slow XHD does this mean it will not boot?

Or that running macOS off the Clone on that slow XHD will be sluggish?

Or maybe I am wrong & the USB 3.0 connection is the bottleneck for performance?

Maybe I should look for a portable XHD that is 7200 RPM or a SSD and also has Thunderbolt 2 port?

Or is that a waste of money?

{iMac Retina 5K, 27” Late 2015, 4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 24 GB 1867 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M395 2 GB}

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Sep 27, 2020 5:40 PM

Reply

Answer 1

growler62000 Author

Level 2

196 points

Oct 7, 2020 6:49 PM in response to growler62000

I could not find answers to my several questions asked above.

So, I experimented.

I had 2 Seagate STDR1000102 1TB Backup Plus Slim Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drives.

I left one with my last Mojave backup, minutes b4 I upgraded my iMac to Catalina. I test booted it & it worked. I can use that when I need to run my remaining 32 bit app that I cannot find a 64 update for …Logitech Harmony Remote Software for my 890 remote)

I erased the other Seagate slim & reformatted as HPFS according to CCC instructions. {Note: I had already paid for & use CCC… years ago}

I test booted.

It was SLOW to boot ~ 3 minutes & 1st launch of several apps was very slow. 2nd launch was of those apps was better but, still sluggish.

I will use that slim Seagate XHD for something else in future & not as a bootable clone of Catalina.

I ordered 2 “SAMSUNG T5 Portable SSD 1TB” XHDs. I erased them & reformatted as HPFS. {Note: my iMac Internal drive is 1 TB SSD}

I cloned Catalina onto each in turn & test booted them.

They were fast & worked great! About as fast as my Internal HD, AFAIK.

I assume I was correct that sourcing an XHD that has a Thunderbolt 2 port & using that with TB-2 on my iMac would be a waste of $$$. No noticeable improvement in speed for a bootable Catalina clone.

BTW, I knew about ** restore but, if Mac stolen, destroyed in fire or complete failure of internal HD, I doubt one could restore system.

I have 2 T.M. XHDs that back up every hour. However, they are vulnerable to the same theft & fire but not HD failure as my iMac. Hence my CCC daily clones. One XHD clone is stored off site & I swap them 1x/month.

So, at the worst, I could restore my system, with a new Mac, to how it was as of the date (< 1 month) of my offsite, CCC clone.

Re my new T5 XHDs, I was getting, several times/day, popups stating that the T5 Disk did not eject properly. But the Disk icon was still visible on my desktop & was still mounted.

It did change from an orange rectangle to a hard disk shaped grey icon. I think the TR5 was un-mounting & remounting itself.

I tried swapping cords & same issue.

I do use a USB Hub to connect my CCC clone XHD to Mac USB port & have done this for 4 years w/o problem.

(Anker 10-Port 60W USB 3.0 Hub with 7 Data Transfer Ports and 3 PowerIQ Charging Ports)

I changed to using iMac USB port rather than the hub & it is now 24 hours later & so far no unmount/remount.

Hope it stays fixed.

Reply

Answer 2

Lanny

Level 6

13,245 points

Sep 27, 2020 6:46 PM in response to growler62000

I would recommend a SSD the same size as the drive that you're backing up.

Reply

Answer 3

John Galt

Level 10

159,192 points

Sep 27, 2020 6:58 PM in response to growler62000

I called Seagate to ask what the RPM is on my XHD & they said RPM is proprietary info! For all XHDs.

Or maybe I am wrong & the USB 3.0 connection is the bottleneck for performance?

No external spinning hard disk drive will ever be as fast as a solid state drive or your iMac's internal storage, but you are likely to find its performance acceptable.

My main use of the CCC clones is in the event of HD failure or stolen or damaged Mac, I want to be up & running again fast.

You do not require any commercial or aftermarket software to duplicate a macOS startup disk or any other volume for that matter. Use Disk Utility's Restore function: Restore a disk using Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support. It will result in an exact indistinguishable bootable copy, only without all the FUD.

Reply

Carbon Copy Cloner what external hard drive do you use

Similar questions