Using an iPod or similar as boot drive?

convertedfrompc

I've heard it either way that you can put OSX onto an iPod and boot from it with all your programs, I've also heard that it's too slow and that it will fry the hard disk. Any thoughts? I recently purchased an Archos Recorder 20 with USB 2.0 and it seems plenty fast (transferred 5.79GB in 7 minutes). In addition, the hard drive has been originally designed as being a laptop/notebook drive and runs at 4,200RPM.



-CFPC

agent302

The iPod should be fast enough as a boot hard drive. The drive mechanism is 4200 rpm (just like in a laptop). And it shouldn't fry the drive. I've never booted from mine, but when I play songs off of it thru iTunes while its Firewire Disk Mode, the hard drive spins constantly. It just gets a little warm to the touch.

ghost_user_name

OS X as an operating system hits the drive fairly often. The drive in the iPod also wasn't really meant for that. The drive in the iPod is more suted to spinning up, loading a bunch of stuff into memory, and spinning back down. Constant use is going to significantly decrease the life of the drive, and there are plenty of people who have already found out the hard way. Apple has posted techpubs on this, and they won't honor a warranty (albeit all of 90 days) on an iPod that was used as a boot disk.



Don't do it, it's a fragile little drive. Pick up a VST FireWire drive if you want a portable boot disk, but spare your iPod.

scadboy

I used my iPod as a boot drive with OS X and all of my apps (illustrator, photoshop, golive, etc) for a period of ten weeks, during spring quarter at my school (SCAD). I would take the 'pod into class every other morning, boot the dual GHZ G4's in our lab from my iPod and work for about two-three hours on my project. I did this two-three days a week for about ten weeks straight, logging a good 60 hours on my iPod without incident.



It never got hot, it never made funny noises, and it was plenty fast. And yes, my iPod lived to tell the tale, and still serves me quite well, going on six months after purchase. Though I don't use the iPod for that purpose at the moment, just for tunes right now. I'm not in class at the moment, but would probably do it again. I had a good experience with it, found to be super convenient for transporting files back and forth from home to class, and of course it works great for sharing the files with my pismo.



But do be aware that Apple does not officially condone this use of the ipod.



Anyone else have an experience to share?



ciao,



michael

ghost_user_name

Apple wisely chooses not to condone the use of the iPod as a device to boot an OS from. I'd be curious to know exactly what the usage rating on these Toshiba drives are. I use my iPod for transporting files a lot, but I'd never use it as a boot drive.



All the horror stories I heard came from the forums over at <a href="http://www.ipodhacks.com"; target="_blank">http://www.ipodhacks.com</a>;

josephg

Can anyone post simple instructions on how to set up an external hard drive as a boot drive?



I have a Firefly 5 GB drive, and yeah, I know that's the same disk as the iPod and therefore is not recommended for booting on a regular basis. But I'd like to have it set up for booting just in case I need to.

ghost_user_name

All you should have to do is run the system installer, and select your target drive as the drive to install the OS on. In your case, you'd select the FireFly 5GB drive when the installer asks you.