SSDs are built using memory cells instead of a physical hard drive. How does all that wear and tear on the hard drive affect reliability, especially on SSDs? These will be processed as normal input buffers which will ensure a successful clone.As a result, Time Machine really works best when a hard drive is just left plugged in to the Mac it backs up continuously, throughout the day, as you make changes to your computer. The 'conv=noerror,sync' tells dd to replace missing input data (from the disk of origin) with empty (Null) bytes. The purpose of the 'bs' operand is to specify the block size. $ sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1 bs=64K conv=noerror,sync Therefore, in order to clone 'disk0' to 'disk1' we would use a command $ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64K conv=noerror,sync Note: Mac systems usually refer to disks as 'disk0', 'disk1' etc. While this simple command and and does work in most cases It is considered unstable as the dd utility will skip every error it encounters which can cause an error. The MacOS disk utility (diskutil) can help achieve this task. However, this command will not work on Mac systems. Normally the command used to display all disks looks like this: 'sudo fdisk -l'. Normally, in a Linux system, 'sda' represents the first disk and 'sdb' would represents the secondary disk. 'of' is of course, the output file - our target drive.

'if' is the input file - it is the original drive we wish to clone. 'sudo' is necessary as we are cloning a system drive. You will have to be familiar with the command line interface (Terminal). This cloning method works on Macs, Linux, FreeBSD and any unix-based systems.

It evolves a command line utility called 'dd' ( Wikipedia) mainly used to copy and convert files. In the process of upgrading my Mac SSD drive (which is a whole story of its own), I've come across many different methods of doing so.Īt one time, I was keeping 'Time Machine' backups regularly which made the whole process quick and easy I swapped the SSD cards and restored the most recent Time Machine backup from the hard drive I was keeping the backups on.Įventually, I came across another method that I was already familiar with already but didn't think of in this particular scenario.

Clone mac hdd to ssd time machine