Spare hard drives, home replacement, and full disk imaging

I currently have everything I ever need on one laptop -- a mid-2009 15" MBP. Having had a slew of hard drive problems over the past few years, and given that such disks are regularly the source of problems (before, say, a logic board), I'm considering purchasing a spare hard drive and keeping it, or the one in my machine, as a backup disk for the day when my current drive dies. The closest Apple store is ~45 minutes away, and I'm perfectly capable of doing my own computer surgery. An inoperable laptop would be a pretty significant problem for me.

So basically, my questions are twofold:

- From perusing the hard drive threads a few months back here in the Apple forum, it seems like WD's Scorpio Blue (500 GB, 5400 RPM) is the popular choice. Given the time that's elapsed since its release (and the thinning of hard drive threads after the last "big one" I found), are there any other drives, SSD or standard, that can beat it in terms of power usage / noise / performance overall without gouging the bill too much?

- I use Time Machine with a Time Capsule to keep everything nice and backed up, but an HD/SSD swap would be best done with an image of my entire drive. Is Carbon Copy Cloner still the go-to for that?

And to think, I was never even a boy scout.

 

The WD500 is comparable in performance to Seagate's 5400.6 500GB and the Samsung M7 500GB models, according to Tom's Hardware benchmark comparisons. There are some slight variations, but end result is that they pretty much perform all the same. SSD will always outperform mechanical, but the price difference still outweighs the benefits for most people.

Time Machine allows recovery in the event of failure, and is easier to maintain, but this takes time during the reinstall/copy. CCC and SuperDuper both allow you to image a bootable copy of the working drive, so all you have to do is swap the drive into and you can start right up (except you go back to whenever the clone image was last made, so you have to keep this up to date).

 

CCC is good if you have the time to do full drive backups, if you don't then Time machine will work too.

Time machine will take a while to restore the new drive, and the CCC method will be instant (or however long it takes you to put the new drive in), but just requires you to do a full clone every so often(or however often as you like).

 

Thanks for the info. After posting, I did read that TM backs up everything, which I assumed wasn't the case (just docs, media, etc.) from something I'd seen previously. I was looking to avoid having to reinstall software and the like, but it seems that TM has it covered.

@ClearSkies -- been dying to go through AFF for the past year or two. Really gotta make the time to get it done...

 

You don't have to do a full clone after you have done the initial one, you can set it so it just changes what has been changed on the main drive since the last time you backed up.

 

Ah ok Seshan, I havn't used it since my last hdd crash so there are a few new features that wern't there before

 

this is the first I'd heard about ccc backup. I just downloaded it. looks like a great product! Thanks

 

You can also use Disk Management to create an image of your machine, store it on an external drive, and then restore.

 

While TM backs up everything its not bootable. So you'll have to boot from your recovery media and in effect do an OS install + Migration Assistant combination to recover all your stuff. With SuperDuper or CCC you just boot from the backup and run CCC or SuperDuper to copy that image to your boot drive.

The paid version of SuperDuper can do a smart copy that only copies things that have changed since the last image which speed it up a LOT but TimeMachine is still quicker.

So machines that would allow me to easily just swap my backup drive with a failed internal drive I use SuperDuper on. And machines that make a quick swap much more challenging (like a Macbook Air) I use Time machine on.

 

True, but Tomshardware only does synthetic benchmarks.

I own a Seagate 5400.6 and I would never recommend it. Here's an example why:


http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010/7

 

That's not entirely correct about Time Machine. When I upgraded my HDD to the WD Scorpio Blue 500gb you do need to use recovery media (ie: Snow Leopard disc), but during the install it does give you the option to immediately recover from a TM backup without first having to do a fresh install of the entire OS and then use Migration Assistant or TM. I'm only a recent Mac convert, so maybe the old Leopard disc didn't offer this as an option???

Also FYI, when I did my recovery...my TM backup was about 80GB and it took about 2 hrs to recover even though the "estimated time" said 4.5 hrs. My vote would be to just use TM rather than dealing with cloned images. It's much easier to keep your TM backup current and offers easy incremental updates. Also, my TM backup is kept on a Synology DiskStation NAS with avg network speed of 4.5MB/s over wireless N so YMMV depending on LAN speed.