Going from HDD to SSD+HDD

I have a 2010 First Gen i7 desktop iMac computer and am looking rather fondly at SSD drives to run alongside my 1TB Internal HDD. Boot and Apps on SSD, everything else on Internal, the usual set-up.

IMO, for an iMac getting an external SSD is a waste of money. Any speed benefit you would get from the drive would be more than wiped out by accessing across a firewire or usb connection (similarly even for HDDs -- fw800 is faster than usb2 but neither are that fast). OWC has a upgrade to allow you to add an eSATA connection but even I don't thing would get the benefit out of the SSD. They also have an upgrade to add an internal SSD (same link). Now with that you get the benefit of the SSD.

In that case then yes, you can put the boot system on the SSD (either fresh installation or clone your current boot with something like Carbon Copy Cloner) and you home dir on the HDD.

FWIW that's how I run my mac pro. 120G SSD boot with home dir and non-critical apps on HDD. Frequently used apps are on the SSD.

I also recommend OWC for SSD.

There have been anecdotes about cloning onto SSDs ending up killing them.

When I bought mine last year, the package was purported to contain cloning software. Open it up to find a Readme that said, "no cloning software included any more, don't clone to it or we rip up the warranty."

I have not found any published reports about this, but a few other users here have reported infant mortality after cloning. Perhaps the relentless small writes are just too much for some of them.

Installing from scratch sounds good to me.

I think a fresh install would be a better option rather than yanking a system from Macintosh HD. I can just feel the endless errors squirming in the back of my mind.

Whatever.

On a side note, carbon copy is useless. A Mac and other Unix systems can do it from the terminal.

Huh? You want to use psync or something similar be my guest. But you'll get a lot of arguments about CCC being "useless". I don't see how the fact that you can do something in terminal makes GUI app with similar functions "useless".

There have been anecdotes about cloning onto SSDs ending up killing them.

I can attest to an anecdote to the contrary. I cloned my Snow Leopard to my boot SSD last year with that "useless" CCC (😉) and have never had any problems.

Perhaps Ginger-Ben meant to say,

"CarbonCopyCloner is not necessary if you are a daily unix user, since its functions can be performed with terminal commands."

Well that I can agree with.

Finder does not directly copy invisible files, unless they are in a Folder being copied.

/var

/tmp

/etc

are all inside

/private ...

... which is normally invisible.

also stuff needed for booting

Mach

BootX

A clone of a HDD will have loads of empty blocks, all those blocks would be written to the SSD...

Incorrect. Most backup programs don't do a block-for-block copy (though some have such an option on very restricted conditions). They copy the files (like cp -rp). So blank space on the source won't be the same blank space on the destination.

But serious question for a moment, do these Carbon Copy Clone drive 3rd party softwares have some kind of special function? Some people have crazy devotion to them and its peaked my interest as to why.

If you want to go through the "exercise" of creating lauchagents or cron tasks for constructing and easily changing scheduling backups, more power to you. I for one just want to schedule the stuff, possibly change the schedule if need be, and move on to more important things like doing the work that actually needs to be backed up! If you don't believe in scheduling periodic backups, well, that's another story.

Though, to be honest, I still question its usefulness when Disk utility does the same thing; select a hard disk ( "TOSHIBA MK2561GSYN Media" on my MacBook Pro), click "new image" and then click go. Then use restore in Disk Ulitity to restore the disk from the image - carbon copy goodness!

So do most other people that do backups, i.e., creating a .dmg (what you get from DU's New Image) is not the way to do backups. DU's Restore, maybe, but I've never used DU for backups.

The big difference is that most users are doing something other than scripting and unix commands daily, so using those unix "sharp tools" cuts their fingers off rather than performing exactly what they wanted with scalpel-like precision.

The Mac OS X Graphical User Interface's claim-to-fame is that it extremely approchable and useable for the casual user, but deep enough for some experienced users to continue to use quickly (usually by moving to shortcuts rather than pull-down menus).

When it gets too frustrating, the sharp unix tools are there for those willing to apply themselves to master them.

A fascinating example is shown in the tools for Mac OS X Server Administration. There are a dozen or more manuals (100+ pages each) for expert Server Administartion, and GUI tools are available at each step, that give you access to most things for casual administration. But as you keep reading it becomes clear that the real experts will be using the Terminal and unix command versions of these tools on a daily basis, and by mastering them will get access to additional sharp tools (some of which could explode your entire network).