Mac Pro & Music

[ZexeZ]

Another day another step closer to getting my Mac, Just a couple more questions, first about external drives, at present i store stuff i.e. music, photo's and documents on 2 freecom external HD's will i have any problems transfering all this onto the Mac's Hard drives??
After some great advice from the guys on this forum, i'm waiting for CS3 to be released instead of using CS2 again, and for a while i'm sticking with the 7300 graphics card, is there any other graphics cards other than the X1900XT compatible with Mac that would be good for photography, considering i am not a gamer??

thanks guys

 

[Cromulent]

The 7300 should be more than enough if all you do is photography. As for the hard drives just plug them in and copy the files across (as long as they are USB or Firewire drives).

Depending on what you have stored on them they would make a decent backup medium come the release of Leopard and the advent of Time Machine (as long as they are the same size or larger than the main drive you are trying to backup).

 

[dkoralek]

The 7300 should be more than enough if all you do is photography. As for the hard drives just plug them in and copy the files across (as long as they are USB or Firewire drives).

Depending on what you have stored on them they would make a decent backup medium come the release of Leopard and the advent of Time Machine (as long as they are the same size or larger than the main drive you are trying to backup).

I'll second that about hte 7300. If you are just going to do is photography and the usual productivity stuff (word, e-mail, etc.), you are going to be fine. Even to do a little light gaming, it won't kill you (I'm driving a 24"er at 1920x1200 and am perfectly fine).

You'll have no problems transferring files to the mac, just plug 'em in with firewire or usb and you are good to go. You may need to reformat them afterwards if coming from a pc and you want to be able to write to them (os x can write to fat32, but not ntfs). If you're planning on the poential for transferring large data to windows machines, you may want it at fat32 to maintain compaitibility (since without a utility like macdisk, windows can't hfs formatted disks). My externals are still fat32. my internal windows disk is ntfs because i kept getting hung up trying to install xp to a fat32 partition on my mac pro. But it's not much of a problem since most of the time i use windows i'm running it through parallels and can just drag and drop at will .

cheers.

 

[ZexeZ]

Thanks Cromulent

so the 7300 card should be ok for photography, thats good, the only gaming i do is on sites like miniclips, and thats good then if i can just plug my hd's into the usb and transfer stuff across, it's only mp3's and Raw images mainley, but i will hold onto the 250gb external for back up, any advice to a soon to be mac user would be greatly appreciated, tar

ps Thanks for that dkoralek, the only gaming i do is the lightest using sites like above, and i plan on running my monitor for a while yet it's a 19" samsung, until i recover from the mac outlay and have enough for a 24". ive also check and both my canon printers are mac compatible so thats good new's, from what ive read it seems the mac is a pretty versatile machine which is a lot more friendly than my AMD machine at present, but thats on it's last legs after 6 years good service, i think it's only right i replace it with the Mac now.

some nice people on this forum, glad to be here

 

[ZexeZ]

Anyone????

While i'm on a Roll, if i was to use time machine, Would it be worth keeping my old 250gb Freecom external hd to back up everthing too??
because eventually i want to use the 250gb drive already installed for the os, add a 500gb for images, a 500gb for music and a 500gb for junk, documents and everything else that gets piled up, so if i was able to back everything up to the external drive that would be excellent, in theory it sounds easy, is it ¿

all your advice is my learning curve not too much in one go though

 

[dkoralek]

While i'm on a Roll, if i was to use time machine, Would it be worth keeping my old 250gb Freecom external hd to back up everthing too??
because eventually i want to use the 250gb drive already installed for the os, add a 500gb for images, a 500gb for music and a 500gb for junk, documents and everything else that gets piled up, so if i was able to back everything up to the external drive that would be excellent, in theory it sounds easy, is it ¿

all your advice is my learning curve not too much in one go though

There's probably no reason to not have the external unless you really don't have space for it. I three internals and two externals (canabalized from my old windows box) on my system. Time Machine will simply be a seemless back up utility (with a slick looking interface). Obviously, though, you won't be able to back up a ton of stuff on a 250 (given that you will potentially have over 1 terabyte to back up. Since I'm not hurting for space at the moment, I use one of my externals to back up data and the other for videos at the moment.

Hope that I've been able to help a bit.

cheers.