I have been reading every thread for the past twenty days and feel like I am starting to get a pretty good sense on what I need to do. This will be my first Mac. I have been waiting since the first of year to purchase this.
I am purchasing a 3.33 6 core with a 5870 video card. After market I will adding 24 gb of OWC ram, four 2 tb Hitachi 7K2000 drives and at least one ssd drive for the OS system and programs - I am leaning towards the OWC 240gb model.
I do not earn my living with this but do a lot of work for non profits - like photo restoration for our historical society (especially glass negatives) and videos for other nonprofits. I own CS4 Master suite and plan to upgrade to CS5 Master suite with this new Mac. I also do shows for funerals with proshow producer so the sytem needs to be reliable and work when I really need it to work.
My present system has 750 gb of photos, etc on it and I have two cards in raid 1 for redundancy - plus everything is backed up on Carbonite - it took 6 months for the first backup, plus I do backups on external drives and keep them at two different places. Can you tell that I am paranoid on backups. I have lost about 5 or 6 drives since I started with an Amiga back in the early 1980's and so far have been lucky enough to not lose any real data. I had to have a fight with Dell on site guy to save my raid. He was mixing up the drives and going to wipe out my back up - I made him verify which was which and he was wrong - that did not make him a happy camper - but I had my data.
Okay to my questions. I understand how to set up the Mac side but I also need to run two programs in Windows. ProShow Producer and FotoFusion. I have called both companies and they will work in Windows & 64 bit - and in reading in this forum and other forums about ProSHow Producer ( the buggiest but best program I have ever worked with) works best in Boot Camp so that is the way I need to go. I am also going to run AVG on the Windows side since it seems to interfere with ProShow Producer the least.
I need to easily access my photos and video from the Mac side for both of these programs.
I understand that if I use raid I cannot access those discs with windows????
Can I set up a second ssd and easily run windons on it in bootcamp and have it boot okay? I have read several thread about buying cables and splicing them etc, but even though I have been into computers for a long time I am not into doing much internal modification.
What if I set up a particion on three of the internal harddrives in Raid 0 - total space of 300 gb for a scratch disc. Will it work if these are not tnerprise jobs if I am not storing data on them ? Can I leave the rest of those drives unraided and would they be then accessible to the windows side.
Initially I would leave the 4 th drive so I can backup to it via time machine - losing an hours worth of work would not be a big deal to me plus I would continue to use two 2 tb external drives as backup for my offsite files.
It seems like I will need to particion these for the MAc side and for the Windows NTSC side - this is where I am lost agin? What program do I use to do this? Will time machin back up my windows side also.
Also if I do not raid the rest of my 3 TB cards, except for the scratch disc, can my windows program just read the files on the Mac side using Snow Leaopard or do I need one of the special programs like MacDrive8 - I have read conflictin answers on this or maybe I just have not been in the Mac world long enough to understand the terminology. If I need a progrma what program is best? Thanks for reading my rambling post.
I really need help making my windows system work. Also can I put my old Window copy of CS4 of the windows side and use my updated MAc CS5 version on the Mac side?
Darlenea
I am purchasing a 3.33 6 core with a 5870 video card. After market I will adding 24 gb of OWC ram, four 2 tb Hitachi 7K2000 drives and at least one ssd drive for the OS system and programs - I am leaning towards the OWC 240gb model.
I do not earn my living with this but do a lot of work for non profits - like photo restoration for our historical society (especially glass negatives) and videos for other nonprofits. I own CS4 Master suite and plan to upgrade to CS5 Master suite with this new Mac. I also do shows for funerals with proshow producer so the sytem needs to be reliable and work when I really need it to work.
My present system has 750 gb of photos, etc on it and I have two cards in raid 1 for redundancy - plus everything is backed up on Carbonite - it took 6 months for the first backup, plus I do backups on external drives and keep them at two different places. Can you tell that I am paranoid on backups. I have lost about 5 or 6 drives since I started with an Amiga back in the early 1980's and so far have been lucky enough to not lose any real data. I had to have a fight with Dell on site guy to save my raid. He was mixing up the drives and going to wipe out my back up - I made him verify which was which and he was wrong - that did not make him a happy camper - but I had my data.
Okay to my questions. I understand how to set up the Mac side but I also need to run two programs in Windows. ProShow Producer and FotoFusion. I have called both companies and they will work in Windows & 64 bit - and in reading in this forum and other forums about ProSHow Producer ( the buggiest but best program I have ever worked with) works best in Boot Camp so that is the way I need to go. I am also going to run AVG on the Windows side since it seems to interfere with ProShow Producer the least.
I need to easily access my photos and video from the Mac side for both of these programs.
I understand that if I use raid I cannot access those discs with windows????
Can I set up a second ssd and easily run windons on it in bootcamp and have it boot okay? I have read several thread about buying cables and splicing them etc, but even though I have been into computers for a long time I am not into doing much internal modification.
What if I set up a particion on three of the internal harddrives in Raid 0 - total space of 300 gb for a scratch disc. Will it work if these are not tnerprise jobs if I am not storing data on them ? Can I leave the rest of those drives unraided and would they be then accessible to the windows side.
Initially I would leave the 4 th drive so I can backup to it via time machine - losing an hours worth of work would not be a big deal to me plus I would continue to use two 2 tb external drives as backup for my offsite files.
It seems like I will need to particion these for the MAc side and for the Windows NTSC side - this is where I am lost agin? What program do I use to do this? Will time machin back up my windows side also.
Also if I do not raid the rest of my 3 TB cards, except for the scratch disc, can my windows program just read the files on the Mac side using Snow Leaopard or do I need one of the special programs like MacDrive8 - I have read conflictin answers on this or maybe I just have not been in the Mac world long enough to understand the terminology. If I need a progrma what program is best? Thanks for reading my rambling post.
I really need help making my windows system work. Also can I put my old Window copy of CS4 of the windows side and use my updated MAc CS5 version on the Mac side?
Darlenea
