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Can someone help me set up my drives?

R

rossagrant

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 3, 2009
79
0
Hi guys,
I'm a right noob so please bear with me.

I have infront of me a 2.8 Quad 2010 Mac pro with the 1tb drive that shipped with it, a further 1 tb caviar black and a 120gb OCZ Vertego 2 3.5' SSD.

Where do I start?
I haven't even booted up the Mac pro yet.
I would like the SSD to be the boot drive so it will require the OS installing somehow and my apps and the other 2 drives will hold my content such as FC studio and Logic Studio content and media files.

I want to install Windows 7 on a drive and don't know whether it's best to give it an entire drive or just a partition, whether to use Bootcamp or a VM such as Parallels.

So sorry, I have used Mac Pros before but I have never ever set one up and to be honest need someone to hold my hand through this!

I would be so grateful for some help.
Thanks! :)
 
Re: PA27 next to vertical PA24?

rossagrant said:
Hi guys,
I'm a right noob so please bear with me.

I have infront of me a 2.8 Quad 2010 Mac pro with the 1tb drive that shipped with it, a further 1 tb caviar black and a 120gb OCZ Vertego 2 3.5' SSD.

Where do I start?
I haven't even booted up the Mac pro yet.
I would like the SSD to be the boot drive so it will require the OS installing somehow and my apps and the other 2 drives will hold my content such as FC studio and Logic Studio content and media files.

I want to install Windows 7 on a drive and don't know whether it's best to give it an entire drive or just a partition, whether to use Bootcamp or a VM such as Parallels.

So sorry, I have used Mac Pros before but I have never ever set one up and to be honest need someone to hold my hand through this!

I would be so grateful for some help.
Thanks! :)
Click to expand...

Put the 2 drives into the bays (doesn't matter which one) and close the cover

Get carbon copy cloner

Clone your current Boot drive to the SSD

Go to system preferences, then Startup and select the SSD as your startup disk

Reboot and watch in amazement how quickly your mac will start.

You can now reformat your original system drive if you wish and use the other drive as you wish as well. For example for video editing use one drive for capture and another for scratch.

As for windows, can't help you there. I use parallels, but very limited and I never use bootcamp. I can't imagine why anyone would, except if they want to be playing windows games. Personally I have my windows installation (parallels image) on my SSD and it's much faster that way, but it does eat up a chunk of space.

Any other questions, ask away. Have fun - beautiful machine.
 
I am not a FC user (or video editor in general), so I can't help you there. However, I am quite familiar with Logic, however. A few questions ...

  1. Do you use instrument plug-ins beyond what ships with Logic? (things like Kontakt, Omnisphere, etc)
  2. Are you recording primarily MIDI or audio (either from external instruments via line in or through microphones)?
  3. If you do have a library of 3rd party instruments/samples, how big is it?

Do you have some other drives (external) that you plan to use for backup or is the grand total of your storage the two 1TB HDD's plus the SSD?

If you can answer those questions, I can help at least on the Logic front.
 
Thanks to everyone for helping so far. I have installed the 3 drives on the sleds and have booted up. I have formatted the SSD to Mac OSX Journaled and am now cloning the current boot drive to the SSD through CCC.

One thing I wanted to ask is a few times during the clone my screen has flashed black. Only for a few seconds but is this normal?
 
Also, sorry to have to ask, but what type of format do the other 2 drives get formatted as? One will hold media one will be partitioned for Windows 7.

Pprior, I'll be using Logic as is to record voiceover demos through a mic connected through an Apogee Duet interface. No extra plugins but all the jam packs need going somewhere along with the logic content.
 
Mac Hammer Fan said:
I guess this is because the monitor goes to sleep?
Click to expand...

Not sure, I didn't wake it up, it flashed black for about 3 seconds then cam eon then about 4 seconds later flashed black again. Did it about 4 times. Looks like the clone worked though, I've just booted the system from SSD from it.
 
rossagrant said:
Also, sorry to have to ask, but what type of format do the other 2 drives get formatted as? One will hold media one will be partitioned for Windows 7.

Pprior, I'll be using Logic as is to record voiceover demos through a mic connected through an Apogee Duet interface. No extra plugins but all the jam packs need going somewhere along with the logic content.
Click to expand...

Format any OS X partition as Mac OS Extended Journaled.

WHen you install Windows, you can format the partition. When you partition the drive, the Windows partition should probably be MBR rather than GUID (Option button), but I will defer to someone who actually boots into Windows.

It was me that asked about Logic, not Pprior :)

OK - so this is as basic as it gets for Logic. The only thing to be aware of the Logic installer allows you to specify an alternate location for some parts of the library, but not all. As I recall, a full install is about 30GB, so there is likely plenty of room on your SSD to just accept the default install and put everything there. One thing to be aware of is your home directory will be on the SSD too since you cloned everything. If you want to use default locations for things like iTunes and iPhoto libraries, you will want to move your home directory off the SSD onto one of the HDD volumes (aka partitions).

One thing to keep in mind is that the fastest part of any HDD is the outer tracks (i.e. the first partition). If you create a sizeable Windows partition and it is the first one, the other partition will be slower. This is the same reason people advise not filling up more than half of a drive - the inner tracks are much slower.
 
Sorry Khollister I was getting mixed up! :)

Great stuff. So what is the best way to move my home directory to one of the other drives and then let the programs know it is there for things like iTunes etc?

Thanks again for all this help, we're making progress! :)
 
rossagrant said:
Sorry Khollister I was getting mixed up! :)

Great stuff. So what is the best way to move my home directory to one of the other drives and then let the programs know it is there for things like iTunes etc?

Thanks again for all this help, we're making progress! :)
Click to expand...

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/14/tuaw-tip-moving-your-home-folder-to-another-disk-or-moving-it/

iTunes saves its music to Home/Music/iTunes folder so no need to worry about that. You can make sure that it does from iTunes > Preferences > Advanced
 
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