Slashdot Mirror
Full Featured Pocket Hard Drives?
Lifix asks: "I've recently been asked to be caregiver to about 150 Apple desktops. While building my software kit to handle these machines, I realized that I would need a good portable hard drive to restore the machines from when they crashed. Cost really isn't an issue but I only need enough room for 3 partitions each with restore images of less than 10 gigs, so a 40g drive would be fine. It doesn't have to be designer, it just has to work. Does anyone have any suggestions/experience with a drive thats going to be a small form factor (throw it in my messenger bag/toolkit), reliable, bootable, 7200 rpm (!important!) and support Firewire400/800 and USB 2.0?"
1. Buy 2 1/2" hard drive. 2. Buy USB enclosure. 3. Assemble 4. ??? 5. Profit!
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Come on man, Apples never crash. Everybody knows that!
-- Cheers!
Does this really require an Ask Slashdot? For crying out loud, just go to Best Buy or Fry's and buy one. I'm sure the crazy fanboys will tell you to go out and buy a 40GB Video iPod to use as a bootable drive, but just save your money and buy a 100GB portable external firewire hard drive. Go to the MacMall website or something and you'll probably find a dozen different external firewire portable drives.
I would have thought this was a no brainer. My only question is why you are so stuck on the 7200rpm condition? Personally, I get by beautifully on a 30GB hard drive running at 5400rpm in a little noname USB2.0 enclosure for reimaging. Granted, I reimage Linux and Windows boxes but that doesn't really make a difference. Then again, if money is no object, there are plenty of Firewire enclosures out there for 2.5" drives and a good, fast, 7200rpm drive you should look at would probably be at the Seagate website. I would start there just based on their warranties to get an idea of what you can get. get ahold of resellers in your area to find out prices.
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
With more and more oil producing countries moving to the Euro, I would say that the US dollar is slowly becoming funny money.
I'm only recommending Thinkgeek's drive enclosure because you said cost is not an option. Where can I get thinkgeek like stuff in Canada without mad shipping costs? Anyone?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Just looking through the MacMall external storage section shows a number of drives that meet his requirements.
Presently, due to mutually incompatable partition formats, it might not be possible to set up a single hard disk that can boot up traditional Macs (whether 68k or PPC) and the new Intel-based Macs. Unless this is resolved, it's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass for the next couple of years.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Can anyone tell me that?
Wiebetech makes some solid enclosures: http://www.wiebetech.com/
Dude, you don't need a portable hard drive (wow, redundancy)! You just need an install CD from 10.3.x or 10.4.x.
.dmg files will work fine. You can even store it https and password protected if you like.
t op.dmg
First, create an image for your Macs (one image per model type is safest). Boot your ideal Mac that you will be imaging in Target Disk mode (hold the T key at boot) and connect it to another Mac with a Firewire cable. The Mac you will be imaging will show up as a hard drive on the other Mac. Open Disk Utility and create a new disk image from a folder. This allows it to be dynamic and resizeable in case your restore machines have different hard disk sizes. Make sure you are creating a compressed image. Save the image to the Mac that is not being imaged. This will take a while and, even with compression, create a large file.
Once you've created the image, use Disk Utility's Scan Image for Restore function. Just browse the menus until you find it. This will take as long as actually creating the image. Just be patient. Once you're done you have an image that can be used to restore any compatible Mac.
Now, take this image and host it from a web server. A Mac using personal web sharing will work great, but any other Apache server with the correct MIME type set for
When you want to restore a Mac, boot it from a 10.3.x or 10.4.x CD OR in Target Disk Mode and connect it to another Mac. Either the Mac being booted from CD or the Mac to which you are connecting the Target Disk booted Mac must have a network connection. Run Disk Utility from the Install CD or on the other Mac. Select the HD you wish to restore to. Click on the Restore tab on the right in Disk Utility and drag the icon of the hard disk/volume from the sidebar on the left to the Target field in the restore area. You'll notice there's an area above the Target that specifies source. You could browse for a local image, or... you could type in the http/https path to your hosted image on the network
https://yourserver.wherever.ugh/images/103xG4Desk
Click restore and it will restore the Mac using the contents of the prepared image file as hosted on your network.
I'm sorry if my description is a little rough. I'm going from memory and I can't find the page on-line that so long ago made me aware of this technique. Either way, it should save you from having to lug around an external HD to service Macs. Just have an install CD handy or a laptop with spare HD space and a firewire cable.
Have fun!
Might I suggest this instead
Man, I need to get laid! Slashdot: you aren't helping
I need something that has storage on it. It should be smaller than a house, but bigger than a head of a pin. I need like 40 gigs of storage on it so I can have some partitions.
I don't know if this technology exists because I haven't been outside in over 50 years and even though I've heard of these wierd things called "sto-res", I don't know if they REALLY exist.
Dear Slashdot, please help.
Sincerely,
Caveman Burns
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
You need a portable drive that works with USB and firewire, has about 40GB of space, and lives comfortably in OSX and XP land. And money isn't a big deal.
Dude. You need to get your boss to buy you iPod.
The ______ Agenda
Perhaps there is a bootable CD that can mount a USB2 or Firewire drive and image it to the internal hard drive? If not, someone should make one...
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
Is this guy for real?
...
These are the smallest cases I have seen, but only marginally so. Both Firewire 400 AND 800, as well USB 2.0. Are they really any better than your no name $10 USB enclosure - no. It is just the smallest form factor I have seen, but only beating the others out by millimeters.
I take care of about 500 macs (~450 laptop, ~50 desktop). We stick mainly with Apple's Imaging Services (especially with Mike Bombich's frontends) to install fresh machines.
I agree with other posters that just about any hard drive will do in this situation, especially given that everyone has an axe to grind about a particular manufacturer. FWIW, we've been having good luck with the LaCie drives of late (triple interface USB2/FW400/FW800), and they come in a variety of sizes, form factors, and speeds. We've had mixed results with Maxtor drives; the older revision all died with the click of death, though the newer ones are still going strong.
For on-the-go repairs, I like the bus-powered 2 1/2" drives. They're easy to carry, and don't require a power brick to go with them. Yeah, they're only 5400 RPM, but that's plenty fine for us. If you used compressed disk images and ASR (or Mike Bombich's NetRestore frontend), you get even better throughput since the computer will decompress on the fly. In this case, portability may be better than the increased spindle speed.
Also, if money really is no object, look into getting yourself a NetBoot server. If you do that, you don't even need a drive at all! Just hold down the "n" key on boot, and the machine will netboot to your restore image. From there, you can nuke & pave with the click of a button, and get back to doing real work (the machine will reboot itself when done). We use one here to image our lab machines, desktops, and laptops, and it really works great. Huge time-saver at the beginning of the year when we get new equipment. Obviously, this requires a decent core network if you don't want to slag the entire LAN, but if you've got a decent switched network this can work very well.
Is that a full featured hard drive in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Why limit your self to 7200rpm, find sum 10k notebook drives or scsi "raid5 in yo pocket" (TM)
Lacie.
Their new portable bus-powered firewire drives are highly recommended (you can preorder them now; the previous models of these they were selling were absolutely required equipment for sound designers.)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
1) MUST be firewire. Intel Macs might boot from USB devices but PPC Macs can only boot from FireWire drives.
2) Given #1, you have to decide if you want it to be bus-powered or not. You basically have two choices here:
- you could buy a small enclosure with a 2.5" laptop-style hard drive. If you want, you can build your own with a 5400 RPM drive, or maybe even find a 7200 RPM one--rare and pricey but AFAIK they exist. Probably not in anything less than 60 GB, though--7200 RPM laptop drives are a recent development. In any case, these drives are small enough that they can run off the power that FireWire provides, so all you need is the drive and a cable. FireWire iPods fall into this category. The lack of an A/C adapter makes these very convenient. Note that some badly-designed 2.5" enclosures also need an A/C adapter--avoid these.
- you could buy a large enclosure and a regular 3.5" desktop-style drive. 7200 RPM drives are common here but I have never seen an external enclosure with a 3.5" drive that didn't require a separate A/C adapter for power. This means you've got to crawl around more for every machine you touch, but operations will go faster.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I have had to deal with many execs buying large capacity USB drives for their laptops, only to find out that their USB buses won't supply enough power. They end up buying an extra PCMCIA (or whatever) card and a weird cable pigtail to supplement the power from two USB interfaces (note that multiple USB ports might be powered from the same source and so the second one won't supply more power than the first). The other thing is to simply tell them they have to plug them into the wall using a a transformer (they don't like that idea, obviously).
Also, watch out for firewire ports that don't supply any power at all (don't buy a firewire drive thinking it will be powered from such a bus).
Max.
If you can drop the 7200 RPM requirement just get an older iPod that supports firewire + usb.
Fellowship 9/11
As far as I can see, if you must have 7200rpm then you will need an external power brick as well. The power requirements seem to be too high for a USB port.
5400rpm is still reasonably speedy, but of course imaging machines is one of those bandwidth-intensive tasks where the more the better.
But, so long as you accept that you will have to carry a power supply as well, there are a thousand options. It's really very lazy to ask Slashdot just for that!
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Funny timing. I work at Glyph Technologies and we recently released our first bus-powered 7200 rpm external hard disks. They are FW400 and USB 2.0. There's also an optional power supply in case you don't have bus-power capability. They are in sizes 80 and 100 gig and called the Portagig.
Is this really an ask slashdot?
I just picked up a macally firewire/USB 2.5" case for $35 (yeah, I splurged- you can get enclosures as cheap as $20) and an 80 GB 7200 rpm hitachi drive for about $155 at newegg. The drive is in my laptop now, but I set it up in the enclosure first (formatted, installed os, transferred, used it for a few days to make sure things were ok). It worked fine off Firewire bus power. Took minutes to install. Now my old laptop drive is in the external to use as backup.
There are more options if you're willing to go up to 3.5".
I mean, it's a nice stove and all, but really. Like anyone on slashdot actually gets outdoors.
http://www.msrcorp.com/stoves/pocket_rocket.asp
The problem isn't the download time, the problem is that you're saturating the network for the whole subnet/department/workgroup unless you've got a rather high-end switching infrastructure. If you're working for an SMB, they don't have such infrastructures -- just basic router-hubs and a hardware firewall at best.
But rather than keep the image on a USB drive, why not just a small wallet of bootable DVD installer burns? One DVD per machine type, one "optional" software DVD per business function. Update the images on a regular basis (I'd think monthly to be sufficient), and archive or discard the older versions according to your business needs.
If you're using corporate license keys instead of per-machine, you shouldn't even have to enter key strings -- just boot the installer, a couple clicks, and go do something else for a few minutes.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
iPod? I can't remember if you can boot from it, but I know several techs who carry iPods with restore volumes on them. And to be honest, is 7200 rpms _that_ important? You're booting a computer, not trying to run a database or play Quake(n).
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
If you have to use the portable drive idea and cost is no object, Think Geek has some pretty enclosures and Best Buy has one that can take a HDD up to 1TB for about US$80.
Personally, I don't bother. First, all of the 250 PCs I take care of have HDDs larger than needed. I partition them about 50/50 and store the image locally. On the image partition, I keep the imaging software, so all I need is a boot floppy/USB key/CD/whatever to re-image the PC. Second, if I make major changes and need to upgrade a group, I just have the image on a laptop and boot with a floppy that has the net drivers and imaging software, connect, re-image, done. And that process also replaces the local image stored in case the PC needs to be re-imaged between major updates. We use Ghost and the Ghost server package even has a boot floppy utility (thankfully; I got tired of making my own).
So, this doesn't answer your question, but it might make it moot.
I tried to order around $550 worth of tees and caps (joined order with a couple of friends). First they cancelled the order for no reason. Mailed them, re-ordered, and got an email stating they didn't ship to the netherlands.
Thinkgeek can go ckuf themselves!
I feel an overwelming urge to make a Chandler-esque joke just looking at those words...
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
It may be that you can get a packet-switch for a couple hundred dollars nowadays, but have you ever tried to convince mom & pop to replace something that "works just fine" from their perspective? There are a lot of places using old-fashioned hubs, and that won't be changing until the equipment has to be replaced.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.