Interesting snippet concerning the newly added SD card slot in the new Macbook Pros. This newly released Apple Support article suggests that it's possible to install a copy of OS X onto an SD card - along with a full backup of your data if you wish - and boot from it.


Combined with SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner and you have a full backup of your Mac the size of your thumbnail!

Could be a useful emergency life-saver, especially if you install various disk repair utilities. Boot from the SD card in an emergency if you don't have access to your system discs to repair your main drive.

Just a useful tip for anyone lucky enough to have ordered a new Macbook Pro!

This is a bit of an oversight, the average high capacity SD card is only 32GB big enough for OS X but the transfer rates wouldn't be good as alternatives.

How slow is SD?

I would have thought that OS X would take an age to boot, but would shove a load of stuff in memory, these things can have up to what, 8GB of RAM!? Putting everything important into RAM (heck, with 8GB shove stuff which isn't important in there too!) would give acceptable performance probably.

The current fastest SD cards are around 30MB/s read and write.

So it could be used but it would be very slow.

That's compared to a 300MB/s read write speed of SSD drives.

You could run a lightweight linux distro from it, but it'll be a bit slow for everything else.

Shame the SD card sticks out halfway.

Could be nice for Knoppix or similar for data recovery if you lose the original DVD and your Mac dies...Though having d=said that, Knoppix probably can't read HSF+...

A lot of Linux distros can do things with HFS+ though and Gparted can handle resizing HFS+ partitions and such-like. Also, are you sure Knoppix can't read HFS+, I would've thought it could (all the distros I've tried can)?

It was only a guess, I've not tried Linux beside OS X, and for some reason thought that Linux probably wouldn't bother with HFS+...Hardcore Linux users/geeks, in my experience, look down on OS X, so guessed they wouldn't have wanted to read HSF+...

There are tools available for linux to allow working with HFS+. My experience with linux has taught me that the hardcore linux geeks don't want to use other file systems, but they want to prove that they can anyway! They make tools for NTFS, HFS+ and allow booting from loads of other file systems.