Now available in the United States, the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks Pro feature an SD card reader, as we have already reported. In introducing them, Phil Schiller highlighted the usefulness of these cards for the professional market, especially due to their intense use in professional cameras. But obviously this new slot it has utilities beyond that (and also some limitations), and Apple made sure to explain everything about it in an article in its knowledge base.
One of the possibilities of use described by the manufacturer is the installation of Mac OS X on an SD card for use as a boot disk (boot) on your computer, which can be very useful if your Mac's hard drive has a problem: you can even use one of these cards to start it in emergency mode and try to solve the problems with the defective hard drive. In addition, certain educational and / or corporate environments will find this novelty very useful for installing software.
To be able to install Mac OS X on an SD card, I need to format it first, using Disk Utility (Disk Utility). You need to change the default partition table to GUID and thus format it using the Mac OS Extended file system. But it is good to remember that the reader installed by Apple in MacBooks Pro also has disadvantages: one of which is that it does not support card formats after SDHC, which means that it can only be used with capacities up to 32GB. In addition, despite promoting them as compatible with higher density cards (such as MiniSD and MicroSD), a “passive” adapter is needed so that they can be successfully connected to the machine.
