Just bought the Mac Pro - Looking for various advice

[kc2aqg]

Hi All-

First post on the forum, but have been a reader for a while now. Just bought the Mac Pro yesterday with the following specs: 1 2.8GHz quad core, 2 GB Ram, ATI 2600XT Graphics, and a 320GB hard drive. I am extremely excited since I already have a MacBook pro and am anxious to go all-mac. I am coming from a Windows XP machine which has served me well (Dual-core Athlon 64 with 2 GB ram), but I decided it's time to migrate over to the Mac.

I have a couple of questions based on some specific requirements I have that I'm hoping I can get some advice on. I should preface this by saying that I am pretty well-versed in IT, so technical descriptions/explanations are not beyond my understanding.
1) How would you go about porting over things from the PC to the Mac like favorites, your iTunes library, stuff like that. If I had to manual entry the favorites, I don't care. But what I don't want to lose in Itunes are my playlists. Does anyone know if I sync the iPod with the new machine will it reset it or will it just sync up Itunes with what's on the iPod?
2) I have approximately 500GB worth of personal data/media. Being an amateur photographer & videographer, this is mostly media that I have generated and is extremely important to me. I have a pretty good DR setup in place at the moment with my PC: 4 internal 500GB SATA drives in RAID 0+1 to make a 1TB array. That array is backed up to 3 external drives: 1 1TB and 2 750's. I also have an off-site external 750GB for redundancy.

Currently I am running BounceBack pro (came with one of the external drives) to do incremental backups from the internal source to my external backups. Is there an equivalent for the Mac that is free? I am looking to be able to sync my external backups with the internal source data with some sort of scheduling program if possible so that I don't have to manually kick it off.

3) Operating system drives. In my PC, I have 2 WD Raptor 10K rpm drives that are mirrored and running windows. I would really like to utilize these two drives to run my MacOS (I would take out the 320 that came with it and just go from the recovery DVD) since they are both fast and reliable. I would also mirror these. The problem here is that using 2 of the 4 slots on the 74GB leaves me with only 2 slots for my 500's of which I have 4. Now I care less about the redundancy internally since I can backup to external drives, so I can stripe 2 500's to make 1TB internally. But is this how you would do it given my current setup and my requirements? Very curious on how you would do the storage architecture.

4) I have a PCI-E Highpoint 23XX RAID card in my PC running that 1TB array for my data. Is there any place or any way I could use this card and set up these 4 drives in addition to using 2 of the slots for my OS drives? Has anyone else done something like this with a setup using more than 4 internal drives?

Sorry for the long thread and thanks for any input you guys can give me. I am very excited to begin my "conversion", but I want to plan it the right way so that I have little to worry about with the safety of my data.

 

[nanofrog]

I'll skip 1 & 2, as others may be better equiped to answer. (I don't have iTunes... to deal with).

3. There are ways to install more than 4 HDD's. Unfortunately, they will require some mounting hardware, and the prices might scare you a little. You could mount 2 drives in the empty optical bay, and use the 4 sled bays for the 500GB drives. You need this from MaxUpgrades ($129.00USD version) to accomplish it.

A second way might be to use Noise Blocker Hard disk decoupler NB-X-Swing. They've been talked about on the forum, but I don't know if anyone has actually installed one in a Mac Pro. So I'm not sure about clearance.

You'd need an iPass fan-out cable for the extra two drives. (Don't know if you already have one). You could use this to attach the OS drives, and use software RAID, or connect the cable to the RocketRAID.

4. You're RocketRAID will work, but you would have to flash it with EFI firmware. Keep in mind, once you do this, it won't work with windows, so no Boot Camp. If you install the Raptors in the empty optical bay, you can attach the 4 drives and set up as you desire.

Hope this helps, and good luck.

 

[rontheancient]

Hi All-
1) How would you go about porting over things from the PC to the Mac like favorites, your iTunes library, stuff like that. If I had to manual entry the favorites, I don't care. But what I don't want to lose in Itunes are my playlists. Does anyone know if I sync the iPod with the new machine will it reset it or will it just sync up Itunes with what's on the iPod?

You will need to connect your old PC to the Mac Pro, this can be done through two ways:

1: Set your PC iTunes folder as a shared folder and share it on the network. Your Mac should see the PC and the iTunes folder. Then its just a matter of copy/paste to a folder on your Mac. But note that this could take a while

2: Assuming the drive that holds the PC iTunes folder is SATA, you can put the drive on one of the internal Mac sleds and do a copy/paste, since Mac can read NTFS drives.


Then, you will need to adjust a few settings in iTunes on your Mac. Go to iTunes-Preferences-Advanced. In the field marked "iTunes Music folder location", choose a place where you want iTunes to store all your stuff (I try to avoid the OS disk for this, easier for backup and restore if needed). Then select "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library", the option above it is your choice.

To actually add your iTunes files to iTunes, just drag and drop the files to the iTunes window, they should automatically be copied to the folder your specified.

I am not sure how to restore your playlists, since iTunes 8 has some changes in the menu options, but I know you can do it on previous versions of iTunes, probably someone else more knowledgeable than me can help.

Hope this helps.