Is My Book: USB HD fast enough to...
 

Ah, against my better advise I purchased a USB EXTERNAL HD: WesternDigital "My Book" USB drive: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=723 .

I want to use SuperD to prepare a bootable back up of LEOPARD ( which is located on a FireWire external hard drive ),

Will the ( a ) USB external hard drive be capable or even fast enough to boot Leopard ( and by next week end ) the SnowyLeopard ?

I wish you guys would stop buying these MyBook drives. But, if this is an Intel Mac, it should be reasonable if so.

Today I had some spare time to try this USB external hard drive with/from my QS G4 PowerMac and the USB drive was painfully slow just in some test copy back and forth.

I will try it with my wife's MacIntel tomorrow but I doubt that it will be any faster or if it can even boot SnowyLeopard.

Right now I am checking out the return not satisfied policy of Staples.

It's definitely going to be slow with a Quicksilver. Please purchase a high quality FireWire drive (and not a MyBook). See the list of drives in the forum...

Dave, I have two My Book drives I use on my Intel iMac to back up. Yes, they are not FW 800 like I would prefer but for the money, they seem to do fine. I have had no complaints using the drives.

Interesting:

Can you boot from those my book drives ?

What is the rpm of those drives ?

Did you reformat those drives from PC format to Mac format?

and,

can you record to them in real time ** ?

** I operate a audio recording studio and I need to record directly to the hard drive rather then recording to the internal drive and then copy the project to an external drive. We burn our back ups.


If you are you using those drives strictly for storage of data then for sure they are good enough as USB drives.

The "my book" ( western digital dirve ) I tested was 7200 rpm butthe usb data transfer was too slow and ended up with audio files that would stutter in recording/playback. Cool/retro audio effect but not when you are recording with a client/singer standing there stomping there foot and rolling their eyes in sheer disgust.

Yes, I can boot from the MyBook drives just fine. When I boot from a backup drive, I don't edit video or do much of anything taxing. I keep it light because I normally am only doing it to run a check on something, testing to see if the drive actually boots, or waiting on my computer to get fixed (honestly, this has only happened once to me when my HDD failed in my Aluminum iMac).

I don't know the rpm's. Anyway to find that out through the system? They are 1 TB and 2 TB MyBook drives.

Yes, I reformat in Mac format. Journaled + and always GUID partition so it is bootable.

By record if you mean audio, I have no idea as I don't do that work on a back up drive.

They are great drives for backups. However, the number of USB ports really sucks when you start using USB. I just recently bought a 1TB Barracuda drive SATA to stick in my OWC enclosure with esata, usb and FW 800 on it. I am now backing up to it on a daily basis and I bring out the MyBooks for their monthly or quarterly update and return them to their highly secure resting place.

I make all my Mac Friends purchase SuperDuper and thanks Dave for your hard work.

I want to add that I also keep Time Machine running to my 1TB time capsule. That is a last resort and believe me, I am not a fan of Time Machine for a number of reasons but I can say the network backup is much faster now. I want to try SuperDuper over the network again to see how that goes with 2.6.2.

I think that's were I went wrong.

I;ll have to pull that drive out of my junk pile of dead drives and have another look at the format or simply reformat it to GUID.

Thanks for your info and reply.

walter