A Fast and Silent Internal 960GB Clone Volume in my Mac Pro
About 3 weeks ago, I installed a 960GB OWC Mercury Electra Max solid state drive (SSD) in the lower optical bay of my Mac Pro. I literally popped the cover, and plugged it in (I didn’t bother with a bracket).
The OWC Electra 960GB was due to be returned from loan, but I bit the bullet (on cost) and I just love having it as a fast and silent drive for my “MasterClone” of my Master volume, which is my main storage for my key files less than ~9 months— I can’t afford to be down due to any kind of failure, since I work long hours every day of the year.
While any drive will do for a clone in theory, I love the speedy and silent operation of the 960GB OWC Mercury Electra Max — cloning (which I schedule, details below) takes very little time, so it’s just always there unobtrusively, and I’m “good” every day. MacBook Pro users (non-Retina) might find this drive an excellent 2nd internal drive in the optical bay.
While Time Machine offers hourly protection, it does not provide rapid recovery of an entire volume. When I have a failure (“if” is not realistic!), a clone provides instant and full access to everything that was on the volume that was cloned, whereas Time Machine might take hours to restore, a huge headache working under time pressure. Time Machine is best used for hourly protection for recently-changed files or folders (past few hours or days), where regular full backups have not yet been made.
Manual clone
Just choose Source (from) of your volume to be cloned, and choose the appropriate Destination for the clone.
Scheduled clone
Click the button seen above to schedule the task at the desired interval .
