It's Alive!

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
09/03/2017 at 00:24 • Filed to: None

Data recovery/restoration is complete, and I managed to save probably 97-98% of my data, with the missing bits being mostly OS files that were restored during OS reinstallation. I got lucky and have learned my lesson and will do regular backups from now on. It used to be that drive space was always at a premium, and dedicating 500GB to backing up was too much space to ‘lose’, but drives have become so cheap these days that I have more than I can possibly use. On Friday I picked up two DVRs for 1.5TB of space, and on Thursday I found three notebook drives of 250, 500 and 750GB. The 500 appears to be dead, but the other two seem to work fine. Then there were the Craigslist finds...

Whilst picking up a $25 3TB drive, the seller mentioned that he also had a 240GB Intel 335 SSD for sale. The price was quite reasonable, so I popped for it and installed it in the old Mac mini. Nice. Like the installation of El Capitan did previously, the installation of the SSD has breathed new life into this ancient (late 2009) computer. Everything is just so speedy. There’s a minor lag as I’m typing this that I don’t remember experiencing previously, so I’ll have to look into that, but otherwise this thing seems fast enough to be my primary desktop again. I did reformat the 500GB drive I used previously and installed that in place of the optical drive, but now I’ll have to find a way to connect the 1.5TB drive that I did have connected to that port in years past. No big deal, just one more little task to get around to.

I can’t imagine what the performance will be like when I replace this C2D machine with a newer model equipped with an i5 or i7...

DISCUSSION (7)

NojustNo > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
09/03/2017 at 01:59

Lots of good backup options. Try maximum reflect free edition . it can make a complete image of the drive and then schedule differential or incremental backups to keep it up to date.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > NojustNo
09/03/2017 at 05:47

Thanks for the suggestion. I take it that’s the autocorrected version of Macrium Reflect. That appears to be a Windows product; the name makes it sound like it’s for the Macintosh. The computer in question is a 2009-vintage Mac mini, so I was just going to stick with Time Machine since it’s already incorporated into the operating system.

TorqueToYield > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
09/03/2017 at 07:53

I generally just back up files I can’t stand to lose and don’t bother with full disk backups.

Jason Spears > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
09/04/2017 at 08:57

I can’t imagine what the performance will be like when I replace this C2D machine with a newer model equipped with an i5 or i7...

Assuming that will also net you a move from SATA II to SATA III interface and SSD, the difference is remarkable. I upgraded to SSD on SATA II and was a little disappointed til I did a system upgrade that included onboard SATA III.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Jason Spears
09/04/2017 at 09:01

I never got excited about bus speeds in the past because drives could never transfer enough data to saturate the bus, but the world of SSDs is making me change my tune.

MM54 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
09/04/2017 at 20:06

When I built the computer I’m typing this on this last January, I got an M.2 form factor SSD that uses PCIe lanes instead of SATA. Paired up with a 7700k, I think it sometimes does what I want before I decide I want it to.

NojustNo > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
09/07/2017 at 13:30

Whoops. I didn’t notice you had a mac. Time machine works well and is similar in features. Glad you got your stuff back!