I'm planning on getting a Mac Pro with multiple hard drives and was thinking about having a main drive for Leopard and documents, one for music, one for video and another for Windows. I was just curious to see how others have theirs set up and any if there is advice to be shared.
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How Do You Have Your Hard Drives Set Up?
- Thread starter impact1290
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I have three drives.
Drive #1 contains a partition which acts as the startup disc for OSX which includes all my applications. It also includes a bootcamp partition. i don't use windows very much but i happened to have a retail of XP which i bought when when my windows laptop died and i couldn't find my install discs!
Drive #2 a dedicated "home" drive. it contains the home folder for OSX.
Drive #3 is for time machine. it also has a 20GB partition which is allocated as the scratch volume for CS3
Drive #1 contains a partition which acts as the startup disc for OSX which includes all my applications. It also includes a bootcamp partition. i don't use windows very much but i happened to have a retail of XP which i bought when when my windows laptop died and i couldn't find my install discs!
Drive #2 a dedicated "home" drive. it contains the home folder for OSX.
Drive #3 is for time machine. it also has a 20GB partition which is allocated as the scratch volume for CS3
How do you create a dedicated "home" drive? I want to have one drive as BOOT/APPLICATIONS and another drive for Documents, music, photos, and email.
Here is how my internal drives are set up at the moment.
Drive 1: OS + Applications
Drive 2: Home Directory
Drive 3: Media (music + videos)
Drive 4: Time Machine backup
1) Copy your home directory to the new location.
2) System Preferences > Accounts > Right Click your username > Advanced Options
3) Click the Choose button beside the Home Directory path, and select the new location.
4) Restart
I would recommend creating a second account in case anything goes wrong.
Drive 1: OS + Applications
Drive 2: Home Directory
Drive 3: Media (music + videos)
Drive 4: Time Machine backup
1) Copy your home directory to the new location.
2) System Preferences > Accounts > Right Click your username > Advanced Options
3) Click the Choose button beside the Home Directory path, and select the new location.
4) Restart
I would recommend creating a second account in case anything goes wrong.
Drive 1 (Mitsubishi 1TB): Boot Drive, OS X, User account info, documents, pictures
Drive 2: (WD 1TB): Clone of drive one, clones itself weekly with CCC
Drive 3 (Seagate 1.5TB): "Media Drive"- iTunes Music and Videos
Drive 4 (Seagate 1.5TB): Raid 1 of Drive 3
I also have everything on drive 1 backed up using time machine on a TC
Drive 2: (WD 1TB): Clone of drive one, clones itself weekly with CCC
Drive 3 (Seagate 1.5TB): "Media Drive"- iTunes Music and Videos
Drive 4 (Seagate 1.5TB): Raid 1 of Drive 3
I also have everything on drive 1 backed up using time machine on a TC
Drive 1 (velociraptor 300gb): OS + Applications
Drive 2 (raptor 150gb): Scratch for Photoshop, Final Cut Pro Cache/Autosave, DVD burn folders.
Drive 3, Drive 4 (Hitachi 750gb x2 Raid1): files, projects, assets.
Drive 5 in optical bay (Stock 500GB): Music and personal junk.
Drive 2 (raptor 150gb): Scratch for Photoshop, Final Cut Pro Cache/Autosave, DVD burn folders.
Drive 3, Drive 4 (Hitachi 750gb x2 Raid1): files, projects, assets.
Drive 5 in optical bay (Stock 500GB): Music and personal junk.
Bay 1 - Raptor 150:
* Partition 1: MacOS & Applications
Bay 2 - Barracuda 1TB
* Partition 1: 50GB for a FAT32 drive that is used to transfer stuff between OSes
* Partition 2: 200GB for an Unsorted Downloads partition
* Partition 3: 250GB for temporary scratch files
* Partition 4: 500GB for Time Machine backups of documents
Bay 3 - Barracuda ES 1TB
* Partition 1: 150GB for Windows & games
* Partition 2: 850GB for iTunes library & general storage
Bay 4 - Barracuda ES 1TB
* Partition 1: Slowly copying all my DVDs to this drive. Almost full
* Partition 1: MacOS & Applications
Bay 2 - Barracuda 1TB
* Partition 1: 50GB for a FAT32 drive that is used to transfer stuff between OSes
* Partition 2: 200GB for an Unsorted Downloads partition
* Partition 3: 250GB for temporary scratch files
* Partition 4: 500GB for Time Machine backups of documents
Bay 3 - Barracuda ES 1TB
* Partition 1: 150GB for Windows & games
* Partition 2: 850GB for iTunes library & general storage
Bay 4 - Barracuda ES 1TB
* Partition 1: Slowly copying all my DVDs to this drive. Almost full
320 GB for OSX (included)
1 TB for Media backup (this is getting low though)
640 GB for current photo projects
1 TB for Time Machine
i'm about to install the maxupgrade optical bay expander and add 2 1 TB drives
i also have several external drives between 640 and 1 TB
all my drives are Western Digital Caviar Black Drives
1 TB for Media backup (this is getting low though)
640 GB for current photo projects
1 TB for Time Machine
i'm about to install the maxupgrade optical bay expander and add 2 1 TB drives
i also have several external drives between 640 and 1 TB
all my drives are Western Digital Caviar Black Drives
Bay 1 and Bay 2: 750GB Seagate NS drives in RAID 1. This array is used for OS, applications, and data.
Bay 3: 750GB Seagate NS drive for Time Machine
Bay 4: 500GB Seagate AS drive for files I don't care about and general playing round.
Soon, I will buy one more 750GB Seagate NS drive and run a RAID 10 setup using the four internal drives. Most likely I will setup a ~1TB partition for OS, applications, and data and a ~500GB partition for files I don't care about and general playing round.
I will use an external 1TB drive for Time Machine.
I have no plans to buy a RAID card because it won't be long before we have ZFS on our Macs and I will run some form of RAID Z. RAID Z does not use a RAID card.
S-
Bay 3: 750GB Seagate NS drive for Time Machine
Bay 4: 500GB Seagate AS drive for files I don't care about and general playing round.
Soon, I will buy one more 750GB Seagate NS drive and run a RAID 10 setup using the four internal drives. Most likely I will setup a ~1TB partition for OS, applications, and data and a ~500GB partition for files I don't care about and general playing round.
I will use an external 1TB drive for Time Machine.
I have no plans to buy a RAID card because it won't be long before we have ZFS on our Macs and I will run some form of RAID Z. RAID Z does not use a RAID card.
S-
I essentially do this as well. Except I have the Partition itself as the home directory. This way I get the little house icon sitting on my desktop instead of the hard drive icon.
All 4 of my drives are 750 gig. I bought the machine with one drive and bought the additional drives from NewEgg for a LOT cheaper. Drive one is the Macintosh HD, with the OS and applications. Drive 2 and 3 are set up in RAID 0 and is the drive array I use for photos, music, video, and scratch disks. Drive 4 is partitioned in two partitions and is used for backing up the other two drives (using SuperDuper).
No you only need a RAID card if you want to do a RAID setup: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html
Essentially it allows multiple disks to appear as one. With or without fault tolerance. You can do this in software too. The card just takes some load off of the CPU.
2.66GHz Mac Pro -
Drive 1: 500GB main drive (OS, apps, documents, etc)
Drive 2: 1TB Time Machine drive
Drive 3: 500GB misc. drive (virtual machines, installer backups, various disk images, secondary backups, 60GB Boot Camp partition)
Drive 4: 500GB video drive (iMovie and Final Cut Express projects, DVD rips, scratch space, etc)
External FireWire 800: 1TB bootable backup of main drive (re-imaged once per week)
Drive 1: 500GB main drive (OS, apps, documents, etc)
Drive 2: 1TB Time Machine drive
Drive 3: 500GB misc. drive (virtual machines, installer backups, various disk images, secondary backups, 60GB Boot Camp partition)
Drive 4: 500GB video drive (iMovie and Final Cut Express projects, DVD rips, scratch space, etc)
External FireWire 800: 1TB bootable backup of main drive (re-imaged once per week)
Here's how my G5 is setup (just changed today...)
Code:
Disk 1: Main - 320GB
System/Apps 90.8 Gi
Data (Users) 198.3 Gi
RAID Slice 8.7 Gi
Disk 2: Attack of the clones (SuperDuper!) - 1TB
Data_Backup 288.3 Gi
System_Backup 90.8 Gi
Games_Backup 170.0 Gi
Music_Backup 373.0 Gi
RAID Slice 8.7 Gi
Disk3: Time Machine - 500GB
Disk4: Games and more backup - 500GB
Games 130.6 Gi
My Laptop Backup 140.8 Gi
Partner's Laptop Backup 65.2 Gi
"Whatever" 127.7 Gi
RAID Slice 8.7 Gi
Disk5: Media (music/video) - 320 GB
Media - 310GB
RAID Slice 8.7
"Disk 6": (striped array) Photoshop scratch: ~32GB
MacPro 3.2, I have seven drives.
Sledge 1： WDC Black 1TB ┐
Sledge 2： WDC Black 1TB ┼ Connected to CalDigit's RaidCard
Sledge 3： WDC Black 1TB │ prepared as RAID5 Array.
Sledge 4： WDC Black 1TB ┘ (2.78TB, Scratch)
iPass 1： WD VelociRaptor 300 ┬ Soft Raid0
iPass 2： WD VelociRaptor 300 ┘ (System)
iPass 3： Seagate 7200.12 1TB ─ (emergency boot disk, normally disconnected)
iPass 4： Panasonic Blu-Ray X8 ─ LF-PB371JD (backup)
I'm just sitting here redoing my disks now...
Interesting idea about moving the home directory to another drive - I tend to ignore the home directory completely as I find some applications tend to dump crap in it like entourage etc... - I am sure they can be told not too but still...
I have 4 disks in my Pac Pro
Bay 1 - 750GB
Partition 1 - System & Apps - 466GB
Partition 2 - Bootcamp - 200GB (Windows)
Partition 3 - Fat 32 - 32GB (filesharing between systems)
Bay 2 - 500GB
Work - All my work related files/documents
Bay3 - 500GB
Resources (All my work related resources - images/fonts/samples etc)
Bay 4 - 500GB
Media - Music, Photos, videos etc
Plus a 2TB external to back everything up on.
Just need to work out where to put a scratch disk - might make a 100GB partition on the Work drive - or possibly a raid 0 across the 3 500GB drives with 30GB on each...
Interesting idea about moving the home directory to another drive - I tend to ignore the home directory completely as I find some applications tend to dump crap in it like entourage etc... - I am sure they can be told not too but still...
I have 4 disks in my Pac Pro
Bay 1 - 750GB
Partition 1 - System & Apps - 466GB
Partition 2 - Bootcamp - 200GB (Windows)
Partition 3 - Fat 32 - 32GB (filesharing between systems)
Bay 2 - 500GB
Work - All my work related files/documents
Bay3 - 500GB
Resources (All my work related resources - images/fonts/samples etc)
Bay 4 - 500GB
Media - Music, Photos, videos etc
Plus a 2TB external to back everything up on.
Just need to work out where to put a scratch disk - might make a 100GB partition on the Work drive - or possibly a raid 0 across the 3 500GB drives with 30GB on each...
To manage your files anf folders try to use this disk space management soft. Though I'm not sure whether exactly this one will fit...
"Directory Size" is a Windows program......maybe "Disk Inventory X" would be a better suggestion.
S-
The scratch array was a huge speed up for me when working on large Photoshop files.
Here's a 2006 Mac Pro speedup...
2.66 quad xeon 2006 model.
DRIVE 1: 750GB Seagate 7200.11 RAID 0 boot (software)
DRIVE 2: 750GB Seagate 7200.11 RAID 0 boot (software)
DRIVE 3: 750GB Seagate 7200.11 Time Machine Backup
DRIVE 4: Empty (will be a PC HD in VMWare/Boot Camp)
People knock the software RAID but it screams. I have no issue with it at all. If you have Seagate SATA drives, be sure to remove the gray jumper on the drive, which limits burst speed to SATA1 speeds (remove them to enable SATA2 - 3.0Gb/s). DO IT.
JP
2.66 quad xeon 2006 model.
DRIVE 1: 750GB Seagate 7200.11 RAID 0 boot (software)
DRIVE 2: 750GB Seagate 7200.11 RAID 0 boot (software)
DRIVE 3: 750GB Seagate 7200.11 Time Machine Backup
DRIVE 4: Empty (will be a PC HD in VMWare/Boot Camp)
People knock the software RAID but it screams. I have no issue with it at all. If you have Seagate SATA drives, be sure to remove the gray jumper on the drive, which limits burst speed to SATA1 speeds (remove them to enable SATA2 - 3.0Gb/s). DO IT.
JP
2008 2.8 8 core
Bay 1: 320GB OS+Apps
Bay 2: 1TB Home Directory
Bay 3 and Bay 4 are empty for now, the 30" ACD took there money.
I just picked up the 1TB Seagate today and am now glad I took the time to take that little hard to reach jumper out.
Bay 1: 320GB OS+Apps
Bay 2: 1TB Home Directory
Bay 3 and Bay 4 are empty for now, the 30" ACD took there money.
I just picked up the 1TB Seagate today and am now glad I took the time to take that little hard to reach jumper out.