What are you doing with 2nd HD?

[agentphish]

For those who have upgraded what do you do with your extra space?

I already keep my 750gb worth of itunes library and 200gb worth of other stuff on an external 1TB FW800 drive which backs up to a second FW800 drive.

I have an extra 500gb drive i'm not using that I could toss into my mini making total internal 1TB.

 

[lilsoccakid74]

Put my owc vertex4 in today, decided to go with a 2tb western digital external for all my media in hopes it will keep the mini cooler.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

What are you doing with 2nd HD?

I use it.

 

[CausticPuppy]

SSD:

• OS boot drive
• Applications
• Aperture library (referenced)
• Sample libraries (virtual instruments)

HDD:

• Aperture referenced masters
• iPhoto library
• iTunes library
• iMovie projects, home movies, etc
• Downloads directory

Network storage (Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2+)

• Time machine backups
• Movies (DVD rips)
• Installation packages for most of my software

 

[wmachotze]

2nd SSD Drive

Added a second SSD last night into a 2011 mini. Went with the Intel 520 series, 120gb. I used the OWC kit and worked flawlessly (thanks to OWC for being $25 cheaper than the iFixit Kit).

I would like some direction from the group if anyone can be of assistance.

I intend on using the SSD for boot and the stock Toshiba 500GB for data.

1) Prior to putting the SSD in, I used an external SATA connected via USB2.0 and Carbon Copy Cloner to place the Toshiba's content onto the SSD, essentially giving me two identical drives in terms of content.
2) Once I designated the SSD as the boot drive and verified everything worked properly, I erased the Toshiba (tabula rosa).
3) Copied movies, iTunes, pics, and documents to Toshiba and then erased from SSD.
4) Tried to dump some other folders from the SSD but warning window popped up saying something along the lines of 'this is needed for operation of osX'.

My SSD says it is still carrying 87GB on it. OSX Lion isn't that big is it? What else can I do to trim up the load on the SSD to keep it running lean and mean?

Thanks in advance!

 

[philipma1957]

basically you did your work all wrong. Not the drive installing the file moving after the install.

now it is hard to clean up what you did.

do you have a third drive that can be attached externally?
if you do is it bigger then the 2 internal drives?

 

[wmachotze]

I have a drive that will carry the total GB of the two I have installed. Please elaborate if you can help. Thanks!

 

[philipma1957]

I have a drive that will carry the total GB of the two I have installed. Please elaborate if you can help. Thanks!

okay partition the drive into two partitions one big enough to copy the ssd and the other big enough to copy the internal oem drive. use carbon copy cloner and do two clones . once you have all the info on the new drive post . the new external drive will have two partitions one should be bootable. one would be just info.

Boot with the external boot partition. Once you are sure the external boot partition works post back to macrumors. you should have 2 copies of the boot drive one on the ssd and one on the external. you should have two copies of the storage drive one on the mini on one the external hdd. Let us know when this is true. DON'T DELETE ANYTHING!! FOR NOW

 

[wmachotze]

Copy that. Thanks for the direction. I will run through these steps this evening and post back upon completion.

 

[agentphish]

anyone doing a RAID?

What sort of performance gains should I see with a simple RAID0? Anything measurable?

I'd go SSD but $$ and I had another 500gb 2.5" laying around.

 

[SvK]

The 2nd drive is where projects live. As in Avid or Protools.....

You NEVER should record / stream projects on same drive where the system lives....

that's a no no


best,
SvK

 

[tbayrgs]

anyone doing a RAID?

What sort of performance gains should I see with a simple RAID0? Anything measurable?

I'd go SSD but $$ and I had another 500gb 2.5" laying around.

I set my two drives in my Mini Server as RAID 0 when I first got it and have no idea what typical HDD read/write speeds would be but just ran Disk Read/Write test using AJA System Test (1280x720 8 bit 128 MB file) and had the following results: Write - 155.1 MB/s Read 149.7 MB/s.

 

[wmachotze]

Re: external partitioned drive

Ok. External drive now housing internal SSD and internal stock drive. All appears well and bootable from the SSD. To recap, now I have two of each drive's contents. internal SSD and external partition. Internal stock drive and external partition. I have followed the dangling carrot thus far, care to provide direction from here? Thanks

 

[philipma1957]

okay here goes; look at the first thumb nail I called up systems preferences and I am going to click on startup disk.

in my case my mini has 1 internal and 2 external drives all boot. second shot shows the bootable drives.



I am going to pick the external drive lacies 768gb you should have a clone of the bootable ssd pick it and boot.let me know that you can boot with the external drive clone of the ssd .

third shot shows I booted with it. let me know if your external ssd clone works for booting.

 

[wmachotze]

All good on the ssd external boot with verification I am referring to as Temp Intel in the partition

 

[philipma1957]

All good on the ssd external boot with verification I am referring to as Temp Intel in the partition

good so right now you have the external as your boot drive. correct? go to the apple in the upper left corner and push restart. wait for just a minute before you do it. I have to take a photo of the keyboard and my hand. first you press restart and then once it goes into the process hold the command key and the r key at the same time. if you are too fast it won't work if you are too slow (it chimes before you press the keys) it won't work. the command r key will start internet recovery so it you do it correct this next screen comes up a spinning world. you need to be hooked up to the net and this will take you off line on the mini for a while. if you did it right you get to this screen the internet recovery screen. I am on a second mac walking back to the demo mac and taking photos to show the internet recovery give me a minute to go to the demo mac. now pick reinstall max osx see the photo. you want to pick the internal ssd when you do this. you will lose all info on the internal ssd but you have a good copy that boots on the external. this internet recovery ssd will be as small and clean as possible . if this makes sense let me know.

 

[wmachotze]

Third time is a charm on the command-r boot. All well

 

[philipma1957]

good now install to the internal ssd this will be a small install maybe 15gb. it can take hours if your net connection is slow. the 4 thumbnails show how to get to the install choice.


the fifth shot shows I am installing on an external drive and that it will take 2 hours plus. When it is done the install will be a small lean tight clean copy of lion. this is what will be on your internal ssd. it should be small under 20gb.

I hope this helps.

once you started mixing and matching and delete on your 2 drives .

this way is the best fix.

 

[wmachotze]

Install over what is currently on there. I didn't miss a step from disk utility before the command r boot did I?

 

[philipma1957]

Install over what is currently on there. I didn't miss a step from disk utility before the command r boot did I?

okay i want you to write over the internal ssd. you have a full copy on your external. I posted more info above. Here is my install the other mini. I picked the backup external partition to do the new install. I have a few other backups. you are picking the internal ssd as you have a backup on the external drive. In a hour or two or three depends on your connection. your mini will have ;

internal ssd fresh clean install

internal hdd storage

external hdd partition a; a copy of the oversized ssd (89gb of mystery info )



and partition b a copy of the internal storage hdd.


when you get to this point we will need to figure out what the f the mystery info is on the ssd copy.

but your internal ssd will be smoking fast. and small 14 gb to 20 gb since it is only lion.

If we find the problem we can safely delete it since it is only on the external copy. If it turns out you have a few important programs they can be migrated over to the internal ssd with out copying the mystery info.

 

[wmachotze]

Looks like its going to take some time pulling this down. I'll touch base to,or row evening. I can't give thanks enough for you taking the time to walk me through this. Hopefully I can pass on the knowledge to another some day.

 

[philipma1957]

no problem. this comes up a lot. so if i have time I post a how to. My fresh install has about 20 minutes to go. then I can do some spring cleaning with my ssd.

 

[CausticPuppy]

anyone doing a RAID?

What sort of performance gains should I see with a simple RAID0? Anything measurable?

I'd go SSD but $$ and I had another 500gb 2.5" laying around.

You'll see nice gains in sequential disk read/write benchmarks, but RAID0 doesn't do anything to help seek time. You'll probably get a slightly better boot time but nowhere near as drastic as the SSD. RAID 0 is also much riskier for your data, since if 1 drive goes bad you lose the data on both.

Have you checked SSD prices lately? They're been dropping drastically in the past few weeks. Newegg currently has the Crucial M4 at $128 for the 128GB, and $239 for the 256GB. And ******* I just paid $299 for my 256GB only 3 weeks ago.

 

[paulrbeers]

anyone doing a RAID?

What sort of performance gains should I see with a simple RAID0? Anything measurable?

I'd go SSD but $$ and I had another 500gb 2.5" laying around.

First off RAID0 is NOT a RAID even if they say it is (there is no redundancy) and secondly do NOT RAID0. Never Ever. You double your chance of failure since you now have two drives that all of your data is stored across and if one fails you lose everything. And as previously stated, RAID0 will help a little at boot, but otherwise small data files are more affected by Seek times of your drives rather than transfer speeds and your seek times will not be improved at all by RAID0. You might get a bit of a boost when opening large programs as well, but a SSD is a much better choice for boosting speed. The only reason to use RAID0 is for "proving your d*** size" in sequential read benchmarks which your computer will do very little of and seriously threatens your data.

 

[flatfoot]

First off RAID0 is NOT a RAID even if they say it is (there is no redundancy) and secondly do NOT RAID0. Never Ever. You double your chance of failure since you now have two drives that all of your data is stored across and if one fails you lose everything. And as previously stated, RAID0 will help a little at boot, but otherwise small data files are more affected by Seek times of your drives rather than transfer speeds and your seek times will not be improved at all by RAID0. You might get a bit of a boost when opening large programs as well, but a SSD is a much better choice for boosting speed. The only reason to use RAID0 is for "proving your d*** size" in sequential read benchmarks which your computer will do very little of and seriously threatens your data.

Everybody should have a decent backup plan. If they do, they can also use RAID 0.