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How many external hd's do you keep connected?

T

trojanmike34

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 16, 2007
28
0
I'm going to pick up an iMac today and put my 6 year old PC in the closet! On my PC I always had two external hard-drives connected at once. I was thinking about consolidating them and leaving only one HD connected to the iMac (it contains all of my music and movies.) After reading more about Time Machine, I am considering leaving my storage drive connected and leaving on a dedicated Time Machine drive. Do you notice any performance decreased by having two drives connected at once? How many HDs do you leave connected 24/7?

Thanks
 
I've got 2 drives connected....a Firewire drive that I store some files on, and an old USB drive I had laying around that I now have hooked up for Time Machine and it's fine. Haven't noticed any performance problems at all.
 
trojanmike34 said:
I'm going to pick up an iMac today and put my 6 year old PC in the closet! On my PC I always had two external hard-drives connected at once. I was thinking about consolidating them and leaving only one HD connected to the iMac (it contains all of my music and movies.) After reading more about Time Machine, I am considering leaving my storage drive connected and leaving on a dedicated Time Machine drive. Do you notice any performance decreased by having two drives connected at once? How many HDs do you leave connected 24/7?

Thanks
Click to expand...
As the above poster said, you won't notice any performance hit. You may want to exclude them from Spotlight indexing in the Spotlight preference pane. If the drives spin down automatically when they're not in use, sometimes there's a delay while they spin up when you do certain operations like opening and saving files (I think). I've noticed mine do that sometimes although I've never bothered to narrow it down specifically to what operations cause it.
 
Thanks for the responses. I'm assuming by unchecking "spotlight indexing" that my drives won't be included in spotlight searches? Not a biggy, as I know where everything is on those drives.

One more quick question. I noticed i'm only given three USB connections on the mac, so I went and purchased a hub. Is there any downside to hooking the drives up thru the hub rather than a direct connection to the computer?

Thanks again
 
I used to have 2-3 Firewire drives chained on my iMac .... never noticed a performance hit.
Now I just backup across the network from machine to machine.
 
I got 2 external USB drives hooked to my powerbook. Another one was send back to LaCie for repair after it crashed, I did not want to use it anymore after 100 gig of data disappeared. I use them to store data, photo's and a full backup of my data. When they get full I'll buy new drives and add them to my setup. From time to time I also use my iPod to have an additional backup of some crucial data.
 
I also have two drives connected constantly via my usb hub and a firewire HD (2,5) that I connect occasionally for backups and haven't notice any performance hits.

byakuya
 
Looks like I'll be setting up a backup drive and a TM drive. Thanks again to all who responded.
 
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