A Silly-Sounding Possibility...Or Is It?

[PGHammer]

With all the talk about using USB drives, memory sticks, CF drives, even music players to hold the OS X install bits, there's one method that has gotten basically NO discussion at all.

 

Hard-drive-partition based installs.

 

Not external, but straightforward internal drives. If anything, older and smaller SATA (or even PATA) drives would be ideal (at least for desktop Hackery), as they can (temporarily) occupy a single port (especially if your Hack mobo is one with both a single PATA port and multiple SATA ports, and you are using one PATA drive, or even none). I have three SATA devices; however, two are hard drives (one for Windows and one for Hack), and a single PATA drive (it's actuallly a backup to my current SATA burner). However, I also have a 40 GB PATA hard drive currently doing nothing (more than large enough to hold a DL data DVD or two). A small *SATA* drive would work the same way.

 

Even better, wouldn't an internal hard drive have a faster transfer speed than even an internal optical drive, let alone USB-based drives? Is there a technical reason why a spare/scratch hard drive (again, either PATA or SATA) is unsuitable to hold a clone of your SL (or Leopard, op even Tiger) install bits? If Disk Utility can transfer from DVD to any empty properly formatted target, why wouldn't an internal small hard drive work?

 

To be precise, I'm thinking of all those sub-80 GB PATA and SATA hard drives (including rescues from otherwise-dead portable PCs) that can be given new (if temporary) life as (pardon the pun) "feline litterboxes" (blame Apple; after all, THEY are the ones with all the feline codenames for OS X).

 

Any reasons why the idea is unworkable (technically)?

[3.14r2]

IMHO the same as restoring to an USB flash drive... Could work.

[kmare]

i use a SATA drive which dual boots either a Leopard partition or a Snow Leopard partition for cloned installs (using Carbon Copy Cloner) - works fine. Most everyone is going to USB flash as a 8GB is now well under $20

[PGHammer]

i use a SATA drive which dual boots either a Leopard partition or a Snow Leopard partition for cloned installs (using Carbon Copy Cloner) - works fine. Most everyone is going to USB flash as a 8GB is now well under $20

 

I had two reasons why I started chewing over the hard drive method:

 

1. Larger flash drives still aren't cheap. While the 8 GB drives are commonplace (and inexpensive), the 32 GB and larger flash drives are priced more like 500 GB and larger *hard drives* (about $60). Throwing in the transfer-rate disadvantage compared to a hard drive (even a PATA drive), the ROI simply wasn't there.

 

2. Expediency/speed. Remember, I already had a known-good 40 GB PATA hard drive sitting around doing absolutely nothing. Also, this is for desktop Hackery (the same method is not all that suitable for portables, and completely unsuitable for notebooks and netbooks) because you actually have the completely-inside-the-case option. USB (or eSATA, if your portable supports it) would be the closest approach. Lastly, as I pointed out, even ATA-66 kicks the {censored} out of USB in terms of transfer rates, and even ATA-33 (the standard transfer rate for the oldest PATA Caviar drives, such as the 40AA ex-Dell I used) comes close to matching it.

 

And yes; the method works just fine. (I had no reason to think it wouldn't work, given that the interfaces are all recognized by Disk Utility.) I have the now-unretired Caviar divided into thirds (using Disk Utility, of course).

 

1. The first third holds my DU-created backup of my Snow Leopard DVD (the physical disc itself is in a fire-resistant safe, along with my other original Windows and OS X physical-install media). The safe was originally purchased to hold critical household documents, which it still does; the media started being added last year (a belated response to, among other things, several near-misses with natural disasters, not terrorism).

 

2. The last partition holds critical utilities (the latest Chameleon and [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] are there, along with DSDT SE and the current DSDT for my motherboard and extracted BIOS for my graphics card; also present are the latest combo update for SL; naturally, it will be replaced by the 10.6.5 combo update whenever it becomes available).

 

3. The middle partition (currently empty) is reserved for (eventually) 10.7 (either the first Public Preview or, if there isn't one, the GM when it becomes publicly available).