How Do You Manage Your HDDs?

[pdechavez]

Lets say I have a stock 250GB HDD and a 1TB HDD. How would YOU personally manage it? Example, Where would you install OSX, applications, music, movies, workfiles and so on?

I just want to get an idea =)

Edit: You don't have to be limited to the options above. It can be X amount of TB storage.

 

[philipma1957]

well it depends on speed needs. if your 250gb is a 7200rpm hdd and is pretty fast i would use it for osx.

I would also partition the 1tb hdd with a 250gb partition that is a clone of the 250gb osx. that way I can be able to boot and recover very fast. the 750gb partition would have my files. To be honest I would most likely want a third drive as an extra backup.

 

[pdechavez]

well it depends on speed needs. if your 250gb is a 7200rpm hdd and is pretty fast i would use it for osx.

I would also partition the 1tb hdd with a 250gb partition that is a clone of the 250gb osx. that way I can be able to boot and recover very fast. the 750gb partition would have my files. To be honest I would most likely want a third drive as an extra backup.

Excellent Suggestion, Philipma1957! Anyone else wanna share their take?

 

[netnothing]

In researching SSD drives and regular drives, I quickly learned that you should buy a larger drive than you need:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-WhyYouNeedMoreThanYouNeed.html

Basically, as the drive fills up, overall read/write speeds go down. I see this in my machine right now. I have two identical WD Caviar Green 2TB drives. The first only has 470GB on it. I get read/write speeds of 111/113 MB/s. The other drive is half full at 1.05TB on it. For that I get speeds of 91/92 MB/s.

Before I moved my system to an SSD and all 2TB drives, I had a 500GB drive for work files. About halfway full I was getting 70-80 MB/s on it. Once I filled it, those rates were down to 30-40 MB/s.

So buy bigger than you need to keep files on the outer edge for speed.

Personally, I went for a 120GB SSD for my OS X boot drive. I get read/write speeds of 250+ MB/s on that. I then moved my data to a 2TB drive that's only using about 300GB right now. I have four 2TB drives in my Mac Pro to spread the data out. I then backup to 2TB external drives in OWC enclosures.

-Kevin

 

[highdefw]

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My needs:
-120gb ssd for the sake of booting up and opening apps quicker
-2x 500gb or 1TB drives in raid for editing video
-2TB to store music, movies, and projects
-2TB drive for backup

 

[ssri1983]

I have a 640 GB hdd and 3 1TB hdds. The os and applications go on the stock 640 GB drive. All the 1TB hdds have a 128GB partition in the outermost portion of the hdd. The rest of the area is left as is, or partitioned with 500GB and remaining space. I use the outermost partitions for my workfiles, and my photography needs. The rest of the partitions are either time machine back up or general back up etc...

 

[NoManIsland]

I currently have 2 1TB drives in Bays 1 and 2: one for OS/Apps and some data, and the other for my MIDI libraries and media. I also have a 2TB drive in Bay 3 for TM. My intention is to buy a 120GB OWC SSD for OS/Apps and put it in the lower optical bay, then get three 2TB drives and put all four bays into a RAID 10 for all my data, moving the 1TBs (+2 more 1TB) into a OWC four drive external enclosure for TM. Eventually I intend to get a 400GB+ SSD and add it to the optical bay as well, to give me speed with my MIDI libraries - I'm waiting until they get cheap enough.