Booting from G-Technologies

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Level 1

6 points

Booting from G-Technologies

Does anybody know if the Thunderbolt hard drives from G-Technologies will allow you to use a partition as a Startup Disk? I have been asking there support and I keep getting the textbook answers that I feel sometime don’t add up to real world information. I think I am really just having a back and forth with semantics over the word support; as in do they support it, or will it work! According to Apple store people it will do exactly what Seagate USB 3.0 drives do, and they do it fine. I don’t know if Seagate will say they “support” booting either, or even what they will mean by it. If anybody know or has had experience with this please let me know. Thanks for any help!

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on May 4, 2015 9:58 AM

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Answer 1

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The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 4, 2015 1:46 PM in response to pctechtv

Assuming it isn't a G-RAID, it might.

You left out whether you tried and what happens if you do. Also how you will clone or install OS X to a partition.

Sounds like you have a Seagate drive and for me I would leave TimeMachine well enough alone.

USB3 vs Thunderbolt - only a real concern when using RAID or multiple drives, where t he nMP's USB controller and bandwidth becomes an issue but USB3 has enough bandwidth for drives, ~150MB/sec.

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Answer 2

pctechtv Author

Level 1

6 points

May 4, 2015 1:46 PM in response to The hatter

Taking the advice from Apple store employes saying it would, I still waited to here what G-Technologies was going to say. They have a 2-3 day approval process for question posted on there support forum. Then they wait the same time for each comment. I am trying to put together a solution for our Disaster Recovery Plan and other useful stuff. So I have not picked up (bought) the drives yet.

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Answer 3

May 4, 2015 10:35 AM in response to pctechtv

Any "regular" drive that you can plug into a port on your Mac will generally be bootable, EXCEPT those that require a Driver to operate.

From a cold start, when no software has been loaded yet, the Driver will not be loaded yet. Thus the drive will not be accessible, and will not bootable.

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Answer 4

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 4, 2015 10:50 AM in response to pctechtv

Recovery: redundant. Separate drives, multiple copies of system(s) and data. On separate drives.

Again Is this the G-RAID? that matters.

And you don't want something that breaks with OS X updates, needs a driver extension, has built-in RAID capability as your primary backup "solution."

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Answer 5

pctechtv Author

Level 1

6 points

May 4, 2015 1:51 PM in response to pctechtv

Thank you for all the help, all answers are helping me. I tried to click on "This helped me link" but it only let me do it 2 times. Once again thank all of you for the helpful answers. As for the specifics I am not concerned with the a drive that has a raid configuration. I am interested in a drive that has no raid is what I understand. Thanks

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