External Startup disk work with differnt machines?

[mtung]

If I make a clean install of Mac OSX and protools, will it startup on different machines?

[Dan Smith]

Yes. I've used the same boot drive to startup Mac Pros, iMacs, and MacBook Pros. No problem. Haven't done so with El Capita. But I highly doubt that it has changed.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by mtung

If I make a clean install of Mac OSX and protools, will it startup on different machines?

Not necessarily. It depends on the OS X levels supported on each of the Macs.

[Dan Smith]

That's true, very good point. So if you have a new machine that doesn't support any OS before 10.10 then when you try to boot Mavericks on that machine it won't work.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Dan Smith

That's true, very good point. So if you have a new machine that doesn't support any OS before 10.10 then when you try to boot Mavericks on that machine it won't work.

Issues also go the other way with old systems/EFI that will not boot newer versions of OS X even on Intel Macs. And then what disk is it on? FireWire 400? 800? USB 2? 3? 3.1? Thunderbolt? Chances I would want to boot off a USB 2 or FW 400 drive for maximum compatibility across systems is uh zero. So like always questions like this are really only useful in their details, and online resources already explain what OS X versions different Macs can run.

[mtung]

Thanks for all this info. The machines are of the same age, but different processor cores and speeds, so I'm optimistic that there wont be any trouble.