Confused, I am...
My Mac Pro needs more HDD space. I've read a lot of the posts about the best way forward and I'm possibly more confused than when I started!
Currently I have 2x 500GB WD original fit (Caviar blue?) plus a Caviar Green 640GB. The first 500GB drive is my system and applications drive, but also has a lot of data on it that I would like to move elsewhere (emails, documents etc, that I need to keep to hand) as its now over 400GB; the second 500GB holds all my photos and is nearly full (keen amateur, like others on this forum lots of big RAW files); the 640GB is used for internal backing up of crucial data (iTunes etc) and temporary odds and ends. I also use Time Machine to an external 1TB drive.
My questions:
1. A lot of apps seem to insist on loading to the system drive, they won't allow the option of living elsewhere (I get the "no entry" symbol on the other drives); is this something I have to live with?
2. If I can move the apps to another drive, what effect can that have on the running of the Mac, in terms of speed, access problems, OSX mislaying things?
3. If I can't move the apps, I'll be needing a much bigger system drive. From this forum it looks like Caviar Black is the way to go for the system drive, but now they're SATA 6 at the 1TB size; I know it's supposed to be compatible, but is there any downside?
4. And is there any point putting a fast drive in as the system drive if I'm using a slower drive (eg Caviar green) for my data; particularly for my photos, using Aperture?
5. I have to run Windows for a couple of work-related reasons (the software won't run on a Mac); at the moment I'm using Virtualbox, which is fine, but I'm thinking of dedicating a hard drive to it (partly so I can easily get rid of the whole thing if I want to!) I'll probably use the existing 640GB for that. Which leads to my last question; given I will have 2x 1Tb drives, possibly, what would you recommend putting in that fourth bay?
I don't have the RAID card.
Phew! Just writing all that down has increased the number of circles I'm going round in. So any help will be very much appreciated, thanks.
Currently I have 2x 500GB WD original fit (Caviar blue?) plus a Caviar Green 640GB. The first 500GB drive is my system and applications drive, but also has a lot of data on it that I would like to move elsewhere (emails, documents etc, that I need to keep to hand) as its now over 400GB; the second 500GB holds all my photos and is nearly full (keen amateur, like others on this forum lots of big RAW files); the 640GB is used for internal backing up of crucial data (iTunes etc) and temporary odds and ends. I also use Time Machine to an external 1TB drive.
My questions:
1. A lot of apps seem to insist on loading to the system drive, they won't allow the option of living elsewhere (I get the "no entry" symbol on the other drives); is this something I have to live with?
2. If I can move the apps to another drive, what effect can that have on the running of the Mac, in terms of speed, access problems, OSX mislaying things?
3. If I can't move the apps, I'll be needing a much bigger system drive. From this forum it looks like Caviar Black is the way to go for the system drive, but now they're SATA 6 at the 1TB size; I know it's supposed to be compatible, but is there any downside?
4. And is there any point putting a fast drive in as the system drive if I'm using a slower drive (eg Caviar green) for my data; particularly for my photos, using Aperture?
5. I have to run Windows for a couple of work-related reasons (the software won't run on a Mac); at the moment I'm using Virtualbox, which is fine, but I'm thinking of dedicating a hard drive to it (partly so I can easily get rid of the whole thing if I want to!) I'll probably use the existing 640GB for that. Which leads to my last question; given I will have 2x 1Tb drives, possibly, what would you recommend putting in that fourth bay?
I don't have the RAID card.
Phew! Just writing all that down has increased the number of circles I'm going round in. So any help will be very much appreciated, thanks.
Mac Pro 2x2.8GHz, Mac OS X (10.6.6)
