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?"

You don't need a portable hard drive.

[fruitbane]

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.

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 .dmg files will work fine. You can even store it https and password protected if you like.

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/103xG4Deskt op.dmg [wherever.ugh]

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!

Re:Steep requirements

[Planesdragon]

MSRP, not sale price!: HL-5250DN [brother-usa.com] for about $250

And I must say "simple economics" when it comes to duplexing.

OK, I'll bite...

[jhealy1024]

I take care of about 500 macs (~450 laptop, ~50 desktop). We stick mainly with Apple's Imaging Services [apple.com] (especially with Mike Bombich's [bombich.com] 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 [hmug.org] (or Mike Bombich's NetRestore [bombich.com] 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 [apple.com]. 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.

Re:Booting from firewire

[the_proton]

Bzzt! Thanks for playing.

Intel Macs can start from a Firewire disk with no trouble, but the partition table must be the GUID Partition Table, meaning the same disk can't also boot a PowerPC Mac (Open Firmware doesn't support it) even if the install on the disk is universal. PowerPC Macs can read, but not boot from, external disks with a GUID Partiton Table in Mac OS X 10.4.4 and later.

- proton

I have one word for you

[iluvcapra]

Lacie.

Their new portable bus-powered firewire drives [lacie.com] are highly recommended (you can preorder them now; the previous models of these they were selling were absolutely required equipment for sound designers.)

There are only two considerations

[sootman]

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.

Re:Steep requirements

[bleaknik]

I'd recommend the Samsung line of cheap laser printers. I have a ML-1710, and it prints amazing prints quickly and the toner lasts forever. I paid $100 for the machine, but the replacement toner cartridges run $60. Although, this model has been replaced by the ML-2010?

Also, if you shop around you can get their color laser printer for $300 or so...

Noteworthy piece of information: these printers are definitely not business class printers. If you do a heavy amount of printing... Go with something a wee more expensive.

Re:Steep requirements

[tsa]

Yes. I know quite a few people who have been using Aldi computers (Medion) for years without anything breaking down. That hardware is really good.

Re:Solution

[Megane]

You can't boot OS X from a USB drive, dumbass. [macworld.com] That was my whole point.