Best Way to Use my Hard Drives?

[BiikeMike]

I have the stock 250GB, and two 320 GB waiting for me when I get home.

I use my Mac Pro to run my small business, and for a home computer as well. I figure I can use one of the 320's for Media (music, personal pictures, movies, scratch disk, etc) and the other as a business hard drive, backed up to my 400GB external and keep the 250 for boot stuff and programs.

Does that sound like the best plan?

 

[Sean Dempsey]

sounds fine to me. If you want to use 1 for a scratch, I'd partition off maybe 50 gigs of it first and use that for the scratch, and then the rest as normal. This will keep the scratch disk for whatever program you have set to it on the inner rings of the platter no matter what. and prevent fragmenting slowdown from other files.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Ideally your scratch disk would be on a separate spindle from your data -- you don't want the heads leaving the data to go and read scratch, which is what would happen over and over again. You want two sets of heads each remaining in position and reading and writing with little or no head transit time.

I don;t particularly see the value of separating your personal data and your business data onto separate spindles. You could accomplish this with partitions on a single drive

I would do this

1) System and Apps
2) Partition 1 - personal data (put the highest demand data in the 1st partition)
Partition 2 - business data
3) Partition 1 - Scratch disk (again, the first partition is in the fastest part of the drive)
Partition 2 - Backup and archival data -- use this to make backups of the personal and business data. Seldom accessed, so not an issue to have on the same drive as Scratch