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What should I do with 4HD Bays and FW800?

oceanzen

oceanzen

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 4, 2006
146
0
Madrid, España
When the new Mac Pros come I'll be getting one.

I'm going to be using Final Cut Studio 2, Logic Studio & After Effects CS3, possibly Photoshop as well.

I'd like to use all 4 bays and possibly use the FW800 (or Ethernet?) for the external (1TB?) time machine drive.

So if I have the standard, say 320GB Drive, just for OSX and apps.
How would you recommend I use the other 3? I'll probably fill them with 500GB drives, I don't have a bottomless budget. But would you recommend RAIDing them? If so, What kind of RAID?

I'm sure this is asked a lot so if there is a definitive Mac Pro RAID thread or web page, please let me know,

Thanks :)
 
If i had money, and a Mac Pro, i would buy a 10,000RPM Raptor, load the operating system and applications on it and thats it. Take two 1TB drives, and mirror raid them, and then use the original 320GB for random stuff you don't care as much about. That would mean you have a backup copy of all your good stuff, a really fast loading disk, and some storage left over for other stuff.
 
I've read that the 10k raptors now have about the same data rate as the 750GB 7200 RPM drives.

Would you put all the programs on the 10k drive? or just the OS?

Thanks
 
Well i built a PC, and use a 74GB (largest at the time, they now have 150GB) Raptor for Windows XP pro, and all my applications, games etc, and i only use about 20GB. then i've got three other hard drives for my music, video and projects. If you want speed, the strip raid two 7200RPM drives and then mirror raid two more 7200RPM drives for security. I ran a test on my 500GB 7200RMP SATA2 drive, and it started out with a higher transfer rate than my raptor, but then slowed down a lot, think it went from 80mB/s to 20 ish, where as the raptor, which when i bought mine was only a SATA1 interface, started at around 60mB/s and went to around 40 ish. I also load XP with that little bar thing only passing by teh screen once, so it's quick, but there are faster ways to run it, IE strip raid and stuff, but with that you will have a lot of space on your performance drive, where i only needed the OS and programs/games. SO its up to you, i've never used RAID, but i've heard good things about the speed, but when you have mult drives, it is even more likely that they will fail, i'm not sure why, it just is. I've been lucky to not have a single dead drive, and i've got the raptor, and three other WD drives, and i'm ordering more over break, so try it out and let us know how it went.
 
Take a look at this, i just found it and it is a great overview of raptors, also, keep in mind there are the new raptors out, where as i am recomending them with the ownership of an older one, so they are even better now. On this page i'm linking to you, take a look at the second performance review he links to, note the location of the raptor with respect to the seagate raid setup, it does fairly well.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000800.html
 
When I get the new MacPro, I think I will be doing the following...

Hard Drive Bay 1: Leopard and Apps
Hard Drive Bay 2: iTunes Music Only
Hard Drive Bay 3: Windows XP
Hard Drive Bay 4: Time Machine

This thing better show up at MacWorld.
 
silbeej said:
Take a look at this, i just found it and it is a great overview of raptors, also, keep in mind there are the new raptors out, where as i am recomending them with the ownership of an older one, so they are even better now. On this page i'm linking to you, take a look at the second performance review he links to, note the location of the raptor with respect to the seagate raid setup, it does fairly well.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000800.html
Click to expand...

I looked at the second link on there
11935.png


I think out of the top2 I'd rather have 1.5TB RAIDed than 150GB with slightly better speed

Thanks for the link
 
I was thinking about doing this too.

The 36GB 10K drives are about £60 or so pounds still, would the idea be to just install the OS there or install all my programs like logic, and it's plug in's etc??

Thanks
 
As you will be using Final Cut and probably Photoshop I would recommend using one of your drive bays to install a "scratch disk" This will speed up both programs .... :)
 
I just found this
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/scratch_disk.htm
What is a Scratch Disk?

Space dedicated on a hard drive for temporary storage of data. Scratch disks are commonly used in graphic design programs, such as Adobe Photoshop. Scratch disk space is only for temporary storage and cannot be used for permanently backing up files.
Scratch disks can be set to erase all data at regular intervals so that the disk space is left free for future use. The management of scratch disk space is typically dynamic, occurring when needed.
 
So, what I'm thinking of doing is

1: Os and Apps on standard-maybe 320gb drive
2: 500gb drive for my Logic files and music, also space for scratch disk
3: 750gb drive RAID 0 with
4: 750gb drive for video footage

5: All backed up to a fw800 time machine 1tb drive.

I realise the 4 drives add up to 2.32tb but I'm never going to use that much space.
 
What is the difference between U100 and s300 when it comes to hard drives?

I'm trying to decide n the best hd to buy

Thanks
 
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