partition, osx and partition help needed

[student_trap]

hi all,

essentially i am concerned on how to set up my mac pros drives for best osx use, and atm i am waiting for answers before getting a new (either 750 or 1000gig drive). at the moment i have a 750gig drive that is sounding a little dodgy of late, and the stock 320 gig drive which is very slow, and currently being used to boot osx

Essentially my options are thus:

1. buy a 750 gig spinpoint to use as my boot drive, then use the other 750 as a time machine drive and the 320 as a bootcamp drive

2. buy a 100 gig spinpoint to use as my boot drive, then as above

but i am concerned about:

1. would time machine work well if the drive its on is smaller than the drive it is trying to copy?

2. if i went with the 1000gig option, would it be wise to partition the drive so that osx/apps and files were seperate? And furthermore, if i did partition the drive, could i still use the music/documents/movies etc tabs on the left of the finder, and if so how could i do this?

thanks in advance for any advice that you guys can offer

studentt_trap

 

[r0k]

hi all,

essentially i am concerned on how to set up my mac pros drives for best osx use, and atm i am waiting for answers before getting a new (either 750 or 1000gig drive). at the moment i have a 750gig drive that is sounding a little dodgy of late, and the stock 320 gig drive which is very slow, and currently being used to boot osx

Essentially my options are thus:

1. buy a 750 gig spinpoint to use as my boot drive, then use the other 750 as a time machine drive and the 320 as a bootcamp drive

2. buy a 100 gig spinpoint to use as my boot drive, then as above

but i am concerned about:

1. would time machine work well if the drive its on is smaller than the drive it is trying to copy?

2. if i went with the 1000gig option, would it be wise to partition the drive so that osx/apps and files were seperate? And furthermore, if i did partition the drive, could i still use the music/documents/movies etc tabs on the left of the finder, and if so how could i do this?

thanks in advance for any advice that you guys can offer

studentt_trap

TM probably will break down pretty quickly if the target drive is smaller than the drive being backed up unless you go in and omit huge areas of your drive from being backed up. Not a good idea. I wouldn't bother with the small "boot drive" and "applications drive". I would tend to keep everything on one physical drive. Perhaps a 500 gig partition would do nicely. You could format the rest of the drive as a data partition and back it up separately. Just make sure the drive you are backing up to with TM is equal or larger than the drive you are backing up. I would stick the movies on their own drive. iMovie (and I imagine Final Cut) leave huge multi-gigabyte files lying around and these are best left on some data drive rather than being part of your TM backup every hour.

Some years ago, when I set up a Linux box I would put the boot partition on a tiny 128 meg partition. I would create the root partition on a larger partition and then put the user home directories on yet a third huge partition. OS X allows the same sort of strategy but I would be concerned it would complicate your TM backups. Just keep everything on one partition and only exile the larger files such as movies to a separate drive.