working with multiple drives

[ansirone]

i have a mac pro with now 3 drives. i do alot of work with all the adobe apps as i am an illustrator. i was wondering would it be a good idea to have one drive to house all my work files and the other for the system os and the apps?
i dont like having to copy the same file from one to the other. would it be advisable to just work from the extra internal drive. thanks!

 

[inigel]

Working off a separate hard drive gives you the convenience of keeping your documents intact when you reformat/install Mac OS X.

Do it.

 

[ansirone]

Working off a separate hard drive gives you the convenience of keeping your documents intact when you reformat/install Mac OS X.

Do it.

should i point my time machine hd to the drive with all my docs at rather then the main?

 

[inigel]

should i point my time machine hd to the drive with all my docs at rather then the main?

Time Machine would automatically backup that drive. If you want to save space, you can exclude the drive with all your applications.

 

[sickmacdoc]

should i point my time machine hd to the drive with all my docs at rather then the main?

If your Time Machine in backing up multiple drives, it would probably be best to add a fourth drive dedicated to your backups, as that would leave all the space open on the other three for your use as you choose. Since TM will continue to grow to the full capacity of the drive, it is never a great idea for it to use your boot drive (as it should have a large amount of space free for temp system use)- and using other drives are a similar compromise of TM space vs. file storage space.

With the price of internal hard drives so relatively low, I really feel strongly that in the long run a 4th internal would be best (I have recently seen 1Tb drives as low as $99, and 500Gb as low as $59). That way you don't have to be concerned about your data file storage filling up and it is simple!