Best Hard Drive Config for Dual 867 : 60+200+320

[dabirdwell]

Hello all,

I have a dual 867 MDD that came with a 60GB boot drive. It soon filled up and I added a Western Digital Caviar 200GB, made it my boot drive, thinking it might be a little faster than the 60 and also needing more space for a quickly growing iTunes library (Audio Vault at our house).

So now the iTunes library is up to nearly 100GB by itself and I have been scraping the top of our disk space for some time now, having to get rid of things when I don't really want to and whatnot (I'm a bit of a filewhore).

So I just ordered anther WD hard disk, this one 320GB, which I think will work OK, but I'm trying to figure out how best to configure the drives. I have two ATA interfaces, one 66 and one 100.

I'm thinking that the 200 will stay the boot disk, the 320 can become a media drive and I'll move the iTunes Audio Vault over to it along with my movies. Hopefully things will seem a little snappier simply because I have iTunes on constantly and it seems to affect the PowerMac's overall performance.

So how about:

WD200 boot disk alone on the ATA-100
WD320 media drive on the ATA-66
Factory 60GB storage drive sharing the ATA-66

Seems like my boot disk would avoid contention and the others would rarely be competing since the 60 is really just a storage closet.

Well, thanks for any advice,

 

[varmit]

Hello all,

I have a dual 867 MDD that came with a 60GB boot drive. It soon filled up and I added a Western Digital Caviar 200GB, made it my boot drive, thinking it might be a little faster than the 60 and also needing more space for a quickly growing iTunes library (Audio Vault at our house).

So now the iTunes library is up to nearly 100GB by itself and I have been scraping the top of our disk space for some time now, having to get rid of things when I don't really want to and whatnot (I'm a bit of a filewhore).

So I just ordered anther WD hard disk, this one 320GB, which I think will work OK, but I'm trying to figure out how best to configure the drives. I have two ATA interfaces, one 66 and one 100.

I'm thinking that the 200 will stay the boot disk, the 320 can become a media drive and I'll move the iTunes Audio Vault over to it along with my movies. Hopefully things will seem a little snappier simply because I have iTunes on constantly and it seems to affect the PowerMac's overall performance.

So how about:

WD200 boot disk alone on the ATA-100
WD320 media drive on the ATA-66
Factory 60GB storage drive sharing the ATA-66

Seems like my boot disk would avoid contention and the others would rarely be competing since the 60 is really just a storage closet.

Well, thanks for any advice,

I would use the 60 gig drive as the boot drive and use the others as just storage. I believe that smaller drives setup as the boot drive helps to improve performance, plus you don't want your OS to be on the same drive as your stored files. What if the OS blinks out, you have to reinstall and loose all the files you had on there.