Hard Drive setup

[raidclueless]

I'm looking for a bit of help here on the best way to set up my Mac pro. I have 3 Seagate 1tb drives and the stock 320gb drive installed in my system. I currently have Windows installed on the 320gb drive which I very rarely use. I have 1 1tb drive setup as my boot disk with all of my data on it. Another 1tb drive is currently used as a time machine backup of the boot disk. I just purchased and installed a 3rd 1tb drive but am trying to find out the best possible way to set things up. My intention is to slowly convert my DVDs in to digital format and store them on my mac pro. Aside from a media station I do a bit of gaming and tinker with final cut and photoshop. Any recommendations on the best way to set up these drive? I have read a bit about raid 0 and understand that improves performance and seems like a good option. If so, is it possible to set up raid 0 without redoing everything that I currently have on my first disk? Any advice is appreciated.

 

[GotPro]

I'm looking for a bit of help here on the best way to set up my Mac pro. I have 3 Seagate 1tb drives and the stock 320gb drive installed in my system. I currently have Windows installed on the 320gb drive which I very rarely use. I have 1 1tb drive setup as my boot disk with all of my data on it. Another 1tb drive is currently used as a time machine backup of the boot disk. I just purchased and installed a 3rd 1tb drive but am trying to find out the best possible way to set things up. My intention is to slowly convert my DVDs in to digital format and store them on my mac pro. Aside from a media station I do a bit of gaming and tinker with final cut and photoshop. Any recommendations on the best way to set up these drive? I have read a bit about raid 0 and understand that improves performance and seems like a good option. If so, is it possible to set up raid 0 without redoing everything that I currently have on my first disk? Any advice is appreciated.

I have all four drives filled as follows:

Drive 1 (1TB Hitachi): Boot Drive
Drive 2 (1TB WD): Media Drive (ALL itunes / movies / photos / downloads)
Drive Three -- 2 Partitions: First is Time Machine, Second is small ~130 Gig for Swap File (I've moved my Virtual Memory to a second physical drive)
Drive Four -- 2 Partitions: First is a dedicated partition for VMWARE Appliances, second is for native bootcamp Windows XP.

It's awesome this way.

 

[raidclueless]

I guess my setup is similar to what you have if I were to turn my new drive in to a media drive and just move my photos, music, and movies over. Do I need to do anything to tell Itunes and Front Row to look for the data on that drive? Also, what do you have time machine backing up? Just the boot drive or can time machine backup multiple drives? Thanks for the help.

 

[GotPro]

I guess my setup is similar to what you have if I were to turn my new drive in to a media drive and just move my photos, music, and movies over. Do I need to do anything to tell Itunes and Front Row to look for the data on that drive? Also, what do you have time machine backing up? Just the boot drive or can time machine backup multiple drives? Thanks for the help.

Time machine can back up anything! My time machine drive isn't big enough, so I only have it backing up my documents!

Basically, you just create a folder called "Media" on a drive, and move your itunes folder there!

Then, you go into preferences in itunes, and tell it to use THAT folder for all your stuff!

Easy as pie!



Good luck, and glad I could help!