Re: TM backups of a restored drive

On Mar 27, 2012, at 11:38 AM, Nathan Sims wrote:

> On Mar 26, 2012, at 10:49 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
>> Buy yet another new drive for backups if you don't have the space somewhere else in the meantime. That disk you should effectively make read only until you're certain all of your most important data is available, and not corrupted.
> 
> Will do. But I guess there's no way to know beforehand if a drive enclosure supports the full ATA command set; it's 'buy it and see', unless there's some web site that tracks this sort of thing, which sounds like it would be
> pretty hard to do since manufacturers change product specs more often than I change my socks...

Well this news kinda sucks balls:

USB
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/USB

Firewire
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/FAQ#SmartmontoolsforFireWireUSBandSATAdiskssystems

You could ping OWC and ask pre-sales question, to see if their Firewire bridge chipsets are supported by smartmontools.

Alternatively, you might consider an eSATA enclosure instead. My 2.5" WDC Scorpio Black in my 2011 MBP regularly gets 110MB/s which is faster than FW800's bandwidth. So with eSATA you get around the performance bottleneck and the SMART (ATA bridging) issue.

Chris Murphy