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Mac Pro, what's your storage arrangement

odinsride said:
240gb SSD for OS X/Apps
256gb SSD for Windows 7/Games (strictly for gaming)
1TB for Home Directory
1TB for Virtual Machines / Scratch Disk / Video Encodes temp storage
1TB Unused - may use it for OS clone

3TB Time Capsule for backups

I also backup online using Backblaze
Click to expand...

Set up a DIY Fusion drive this week, now my arrangement looks like this:

Bay 1: 240gb SSD (Fusion Drive disk 1)
Bay 2: 1TB (Fusion drive disk 2)
Bay 3: 256gb SSD for Bootcamp
Bay 4: 1TB for Virtual Machines / Scratch Disk / Video Encodes temp storage
Optical Bay: 1TB for bootable clone of Fusion Drive (may need to expand to a 2TB drive soon)
 
Samsung 840 Pro (512 GB) on X2 card - OS X and Apps
Samsung 840 Pro (512 GB) on X2 card - Data Storage
HD 1 (2 TB) - 2 TB Backup RAID with HD 2
HD 2 (2 TB) - 2 TB Backup RAID with HD 1
HD 3 (2 TB) - 2 TB Media (Aperture/ITunes/Movies) RAID with HD 4
HD 4 (2 TB) - 2 TB Media (Aperture/ITunes/Movies) RAID with HD 3
 
-2x Intel 520 series 180GB SSDs on Velocity X2's in RAID0 (OS/apps)
-1x Plextor M3 512GB SSD (Bootcamp for Windows)
-3x 4TB 7200RPM spindle drives (Hitachi/Seagate) for local storage

I use a Windows Home Server configuration with ~18TB of storage as well, for media and such.
 
Some huge RAIDs you have here 🙂

My setup (since 3 years).

Optical bay:
– 80GB Intel G2 SSD – primary OS + APPs
– 320GB Toshiba 5400 rpm – secondary OSes + clone of boot drive, just in case
HDD bays:
– 3x Samsung HD502HJ (500GB) in RAID 0 – home folder and data
– 1TB WD Green – TM
 
I've got an internal RAID with two 1.5 TB WD black drives, a 3 TB WD Red running backup on those, and another 1 TB black for Boot Camp.

I'd move over to SSDs, but this Mac Pro is going to be replaced with whatever comes out this year anyway, so it's not worth the cost to me yet.
 
odinsride said:
Set up a DIY Fusion drive this week, now my arrangement looks like this:

Bay 1: 240gb SSD (Fusion Drive disk 1)
Bay 2: 1TB (Fusion drive disk 2)
Bay 3: 256gb SSD for Bootcamp
Bay 4: 1TB for Virtual Machines / Scratch Disk / Video Encodes temp storage
Optical Bay: 1TB for bootable clone of Fusion Drive (may need to expand to a 2TB drive soon)
Click to expand...

How are you liking the DIY Fusion setup?

I read http://blog.macsales.com/15617-creating-your-own-fusion-drive that and thought it might not be very good with small (8GB ~ 64GB) SSDs because of this:
"a Fusion Drive will first fill the faster SSD portion, then start filling the slower hard drive. Once writing is complete, data will be moved from the SSD to the hard drive until there is 4GB free on the SSD again."
Click to expand...
which I thought would still leave too many small files on the larger slower HDD. And even with larger SSDs I thought it might start out fast (assuming you install OS X as the 1st task) and then grow to something only so-so. The SSHD hybrid drives now appearing seem to have a more intelligent weighting algorithm for sorting out which files to move to the slower media.

I'm not sure if Apple's Core Storage supports anything like that or not. The article seems to imply that it doesn't.

Anyone know?


.
 
Last edited:
Tesselator said:
How are you liking the DIY Fusion setup?

I read http://blog.macsales.com/15617-creating-your-own-fusion-drive that and thought it might not be very good with small (8GB ~ 64GB) SSDs because of this:
Click to expand...

Even Apples 128GB allotment is really not enough for full SSD feel at all times. I just did a 512GB + 1TB and no problem with that one🙂 Just a little overkill.
A 240-256GB should hit the sweet spot for Fusion. Massive storage and very little slowdowns in real world scenarios.
 
Yeah, but what I"m inquiring about is a little different.

According to that article the Apple Fusion system fills up the SSD completely 1st. Then, when you're not looking or whatever it moves some off the SSD (to the HDD) until there are 4GB free. Thus there will always be a 4GB free space on the SSD.

Great, so let's say there is exactly 4GB free and a small system file changes. When you're not looking it will then be moved over to the slow HDD. And so on forever until there is a mixture of both frequently and seldomly used large AND small files scattered across both drives. It also means that a 32GB file would write fast for the 1st 4GB and then slow down to HDD speeds for the remaining 28GB.

Well, that sounds pretty dumb (as in not very intelligent) to me and I was wondering what it was like using such a system. Of course if you give it a 250 or 500GB SSD then you will probably never be hitting the HDD at all - no need for a Fusion setup in that case.

Fusion theoretically, should be used to speed up the HDD like a huge cache - only a non-volatile one. Classically and logically you would want something just big enough to fit 100% of all files on the System partition which are smaller than _____ (probably 256K ?) and accessed more than about once a week - plus about 4 to 8GB of managed free space. (I guess that would be about a 32 or 64GB SSD. But to do that an algorithm for sorting and registering candidate files is needed and it SOUNDS LIKE Apple's system doesn't have that.

But I dunno... That's true? Not? Anyone know?
 
Well, that sounds pretty dumb (as in not very intelligent) to me and I was wondering what it was like using such a system. Of course if you give it a 250 or 500GB SSD then you will probably never be hitting the HDD at all - no need for a Fusion setup in that case.
Click to expand...

Using such a system (32GB-64GB SSD) will be slow. Almost as slow as a regular HDD. Unless you run a system with under 120GB of data spanning all volumes and most if it Music and movies. As I understand it though if you have a 256GB SSD and a 2TB HDD that you create a Fusion drive to 2.25GB's and then fill it with 1TB of data you will of course hit the HDD and often but based on targeting LBA's the data will favor the most frequented access' and move it to SSD or keep it there if it resided there already. Using Apple magic, of course.

Anand should have the answer you seek:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6679/a-month-with-apples-fusion-drive/3

I don't run Fusion at home. I symlink what I want and change what does not work speed wise. Since you are asking the question, either a cache solution or dedicated SSD | HDD setup with granularity would be preferred. I don't think that it is "not intelligent" I just don't think it to be a good system for anything smaller than Apples 128GB model (for normal standard users and advanced) as shown by all testing models after filling up the SSD space. With 200GB+ being a sweeter spot for most users (ie. not power users who should really just do what they know anyway). This is for Mom and Dad. The tech was created so Apple can sell more HW and to "simplify" something that really didn't need simplifying. If you really need to eke out all available performance don't let Apple or any algorithm do it for you. The cache solutions are effectively hamstrung in different areas as well.
 
derbothaus said:
Anand should have the answer you seek:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6679/a-month-with-apples-fusion-drive/3
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for that link! It seems Apple is in fact doing it right and maybe even better than competitive 1-piece hybrid drives. So the authors of the article I read are the typical to be avoided unless you like confusion, n00bs. Figures! When will they learn to omit what they don't know and just focus on what they do know? 🙄

Chris S. and Ron, that's you! Shape up you weenies! 😀
 
Tesselator said:
How are you liking the DIY Fusion setup
Click to expand...

So far so good...I can't really tell a noticeable difference in speed from when I had a dedicated SSD for OSX. I'm very happy with it so far, especially since I don't have to mess around with symlinking my user folder anymore.
 
Upper Bay: LG Blu-ray burner
Lower Bay: WD RE4 4TB HD - Media
Bay 1: WD RE4 2TB HD - Mountain Lion boot drive
Bay 2: WD RE4 2TB HD - Windows 8 Pro boot drive
Bay 3: WD RE4 2TB HD - Images (photography)
Bay 4: WD RE4 2TB HD - Originals (camera downloads, EyeTV programs

Four OWC Mercury boxes with WD RE4 and Caviar Black drives as backups + one Snow Leopard boot drive (because I still love Snow Leopard).
 
odinsride said:
So far so good...I can't really tell a noticeable difference in speed from when I had a dedicated SSD for OSX. I'm very happy with it so far, especially since I don't have to mess around with symlinking my user folder anymore.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the response bro!

Looks like Fusion will become pretty popular! I'm waiting for someone to hack it over to Lion. 🙂 Or I may do this myself if I can. I've been snooping around inside the ML distribution files some already.
 
Upper optical bay: LG Superdrive
Lower optical bay: 1TB Samsung w/ 10.6.8 SnowLeo* @ OWC MultiMount, 1x 2,5" empty yet

PCI Slot-2: Velocity Solo x2, Samsung 830/256 @ SATA III w/ 10.8.2 ML, bootdisk
PCI Slot-4: Apple Mac Pro Raid Card, SAS w/ 4x 2TB Seagate Barracuda

Bay 1: Seagate 2TB w/ 10.7.5 Lion, Bootcamp w/ Win7 x64
Bay 2+3: 2x Seagate 2TB = 4TB Raid 0, scratch disk
Bay 4: Seagate 2TB w/ 10.8.2 ML CCC Backup, TM

* for Rosetta & FreeHand. 🙄
 
128Gig SSD for OSX and apps.

2 TB for Time Machine

2TB for iTunes library, digital photos and aperture library

2 TB for videos FcpX events and projects

2TB with 3 partitions : SSD clone, leopard boot drive, Documents e.g. Spreadsheets, personal docs

External 128 gig SSD for movies etc streamed to my TV through PS3Media Server.
 
256 corsair ssd in disk drive bay for OS and Apps
1 gb seagate in bay 1 for User files
2 x 640 gb samsung in bay 2,3 for video (scratch disk)
1 gb hitachi in bay 4 for video archive
3 tb usb 3.0 hd for back up
 
Anybody have a Drobo maxed with 4tb drives to time machine their loaded MPs?
 
musio said:
Anybody have a Drobo maxed with 4tb drives to time machine their loaded MPs?
Click to expand...


Drobo is WAY too slow and WAY too expensive for me. $800 for an $80 box with modified public domain software doesn't sound too enticing to me. YMMV.
 
Mac Pro x2

ldap server Mac Pro 1

4 x WD Black Caviar 1 TB

2 TB RAID 10 Lion Server 10.7.x
2 TB FW800 Bootable Backup

ldap backup Mac Pro 2

4 x Seagate 7200.12 1 TB

1 TB RAID 1 Lion Server 10.7.x
1 TB FW800 Bootable Backup
1 TB (500 GB Windows XPx64 | 500 GB Scratch 1)
1 TB (500 GB Windows 7x64 | 500 GB Scratch 2 (Backup of Scratch 1))

Laters...
 
Mac Pro 4,1

(1) Samsung 830 256GB SSD in lower ODD bay as boot disk (Crucial M4 as backup clone)
LG 10x BD-R in upper ODD bay

Areca 1880ix-12 RAID card, stock 1GB DDR2
Sans Digital TR8X 8-bay box with two mini-SAS ports
(8) WD2003FYYS 2TB RE-4 HDDs in RAID 6

(1) 4TB Hitachi 5K4000 HDD
(3) 1TB Hitachi/Apple HDDs in RAID 0

Voyager Q dock for about fifteen other SSDs and HDDs used as backups
Caldigit FASTA-6GU3 PCI card for eSATA and USB 3.0 ports
 
My setup: 2TB boot drive, 3TB drive dedicated to Final Cut Projects, 4TB drive for Final Cut Events, and a 4TB time machine drive that (tries) backs up the other 3.
 
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