I am new to Mac and have a Mini with a 320G hard drive. I am used to Windows desktops where I just kept adding additional and larger internal or external disk drives and get the accompanying new disk drive letters when I add new storage. I am trying to devise the proper scheme for adding disk drive capacity to my mini.
From what I have read, the best solution seems to be to leave the original 320G drive in place and then add one or more external hard drives as needed. As I understand it, the new drive(s) will show up in the Finder's Devices section but any data, documents, photos, etc. on the external drive would show up in the appropriate Places section without regard to which physical disk it was located on. In other words, the added external drives would become just part of a pool of total storage as far as Places are concerned, even though the new drives would show up as separate listings in the Devices section of Finder. Is this a correct understanding? If so, if I added a second external drive (either daisy chained or separately attached) I assume it would simply be added to the total storage pool similar to the first external drive added. Do all applications need to be installed on the internal Macintosh HD drive, or can they be installed on the external drive, and is there a performance hit if an application is installed on an external drive?
Is this the proper way to plan for external drive expansion, or is there a better way?
Also, I assume that Time Machine backs up data on both internal and external drives as part of its backup scheme.
Thanks for your help.
From what I have read, the best solution seems to be to leave the original 320G drive in place and then add one or more external hard drives as needed. As I understand it, the new drive(s) will show up in the Finder's Devices section but any data, documents, photos, etc. on the external drive would show up in the appropriate Places section without regard to which physical disk it was located on. In other words, the added external drives would become just part of a pool of total storage as far as Places are concerned, even though the new drives would show up as separate listings in the Devices section of Finder. Is this a correct understanding? If so, if I added a second external drive (either daisy chained or separately attached) I assume it would simply be added to the total storage pool similar to the first external drive added. Do all applications need to be installed on the internal Macintosh HD drive, or can they be installed on the external drive, and is there a performance hit if an application is installed on an external drive?
Is this the proper way to plan for external drive expansion, or is there a better way?
Also, I assume that Time Machine backs up data on both internal and external drives as part of its backup scheme.
Thanks for your help.
