What do I do with standard 320gb drive?

Give it away. That's what I'm doing with mine. I've got 2x750GB and 2x500GB that'll be going in my MP. To me, with how dirt cheap storage is at the moment, having 320GB take up an internal bay is a wasted opportunity.

I suppose my other option is to stick it in a USB2/eSATA case I have laying around and use it as a laptop backup drive. I'm using a 160GB for that now.

Too many drives, not enough SATA connectors...

 

You could use the 320GB drive to hold your OS and applications, a separate 1TB drive to store data, and then two high-speed scratch discs.

Or just use the 320GB for the OS and the 1TB for apps and data. Makes OS upgrades easier - no need to back-up your data.

 

Are scratch disks kept blank?

 

What I did with my 1G MacPro's 160GB drive was buy another and RAID0 it, keeping a 400GB one for media. A 320GB drive can be had for super-cheap ($70-80), and a RAID0 gives you 640GB. Yeah, it's software RAID, and there's the slightly higher failure chance, but it's a nice way to get performance and space.

Another option is to use your spare 5.25 inch bay to hold a HDD instead of a second optical drive. Given that you can steal cables that come with your retail drives (the drive chassis on the Mac Pro is cable-free), it's not a terrible option. I'd have to dig out the manual or something, but there are two onboard SATA ports which are supposed to be for SATA optical drives. I think the superdrive in the new ones is still ATA (mine from a year ago is, and I can't find anything to say this one is SATA), so both those ports are free.

You could drag those two SATA ports to a cheap $20 eSATA pass-through, and toss the drive in an eSATA enclosure.

Finally, you could just ship it to me (PM for address). I don't really need it, but I'll use it to replace my 250GB Linux/Windows/VMWare drive.

 

If I install the RAID card, can I then stripe 4 1TB drives together as RAID5 and use that as my boot drive? My media/scratch is on an xserve raid.

 

Send it to me. I'll pay the shipping.

 

The 320GB drive only has 8MB cache, while a 500GB has 16MB cache.

I'm thinking don't keep the OS and apps on the 320....that extra cache from a 500GB drive might help speed things up.

-Kevin

 

Why not just upgrade the 320 to a 500 at the time of purchase so you can use it and not waste the drive? It's a cheap upgrade.

 

No, it's not a cheap upgrade. $100 to upgrade 320 -> 500 GB is enough to buy an extra $500. It's cheaper to buy a 500 GB separately and sell the 320 or use it for some other purpose.

In my ancient G4, I have 2 120 GB drives (hardware limits me from going any larger). I plan on purchasing 2 500 GB drives in addition to the 320. One 500 will be OS, apps, data, etc. The second will be Time Machine backup. The third will be used for downloads data storage such as ripped movies for iPod, as scratch disk, and as temporary storage with massive photo projects (like my last trip ended up with 20 GB of stuff that on my laptop was horrible to deal with). This will be a huge increase in storage space for me, and I don't think I'm going to fill it up for a long time.

 

I dont think the 320gb drive being 8mb cache would make that much difference to apps and os speed.

I was thinking about buying a 32gb 10,000rpm WD drive for os and apps then have the 320gb drive and buy another 500gb drive for storage etc... good idea?

 

If you've made the decision to keep the 320, I think the concensus is that unless you're a real disk I/O power user, you can keep the OS and apps on the 320 or not, it's up to you (though the question is, how do you have 320 GB of OS and apps?). If you are a power user, then the 16 MB cache vs. the 8 will be a benefit to you and so you may want to keep it on a larger drive that has a larger cache.

For most purposes, I think it's really just up to you with arguments on both sides.

 

Put it in an external USB2 enclosure and use it as a backup drive...best option.

 

I'll take it off your hands for the price of postage mate

 

Do we know what brands of drives Apple has been using for each of the different sizes?

 

i got the 500gb one as it was only 90 extra with the student discount, could i partition the drive and use half as a scratch disk for photoshop?

 

IMHO: use it as a BootCamp disk, if it's possible and you are interested in doing so.
________
vapormatic

 

I don't think it would help you much. You'd wind up reading/writing to two disparate spots on the drive, forcing it to do a lot of seeking, and actually costing you time.

 

dang. oh well. thanks!

 

Just wondering why you need 2 scratch disks?

Separate question, if scratch disk is even necessary these days if one has +8GB of RAM?