SSD & HDD 2 drive format query Mac Pro 3.1

your 320GB - and very old - is your safety net and does not get altered for now

Your boot drive - SSD Blade Drive for "Classic" Mac Pro

And I would invest in

1TB data drive

1-2TB for TimeMachine

A drive to clone your system

Setup Assistant after you install OS X is a safe and easy way to import your prefs and some of your home account, MA is not.

I would use Bombich's CCC though to clone just the data, your home folder's sub-folders. Why? it can do a proper checksum on all files copied.

Never ever have only one set of live data and one backup, keep a spare handy.

Did you ask again for alternatives? Tends to be a dialogue and conversation.

There are FAQ / How To Guides - designed to make it easy.

You should have had 2-4 hdd all these years. There is no reason you can't have a system A and system B and then a data drive and backup drive. So you could run Snow Leopard off one and test out Mountain Lion or above.

I'd also look at adding some RAM. FBDIMMs are excellent and inexpensive,.

For SSD I favor the Samsung EVO 850 250GB $120 vs the 128GB for $80. Add $15 Icy Dock adapter IF you don't go with the XP941 which uses one of the PCIe slots.

Assuming you still have the OEM 2600XT, that would be another item to look into

Your system can be upgraded, and running better like never before.

Disk drives rarely last 6 years and not have bad sectors and errors.

Your Mac can boot from any drive, external or internal. There is no problem with having multiple bootable drives in the machine. The boot drive is the one last-specified in System preferences > Startup Disk, or the one you last Installed on, whichever is later.

Mac OS X and related Applications takes under 30GB (plus additional Applications you have added).

This article discusses establishing a Boot Drive. You MUST keep at least one Admin account on your boot drive for emergencies.

User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive

.

Just connect the SSD to the Mac and install the OS and necessary programs on the SSD. See:

User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive

Make sure you have a backup of the data on the old HD. Then delete system files from the the old SSD. Edit the preferences on the boot drive to point to the data on the old HD.

Better yet would be to copy data from the old HD to a new HD that you installed in the Mac and use the old HD for backup.

If you really want a fast boot SSD see:

Fastest SSD in Mac Pro 2006 thru 2012, Leopard and above

Yes, that solution will work fine.

MrTomsFunnyScene wrote:

Sorry, but I'm still massively confused.

What I literally want is two drives in the machine - SSD to boot from which will contain the programs and the second HDD drive which music and bits go on and I want those two drives completely empty to begin with. I'm getting confused with having to migrate stuff over from the current drive. Can I not wipe the second drive (all relevant stuff is backed up to an external drive), put the SSD in, format that as boot drive with programs on, then format the HDD and use that (essentially) as a repository for all other data like pictures, video etc? I realise that I'll have to reinstall all the programs, but I've done that plenty of times as I do a clean install on my Mac every 6 months or so anyway. Do I have to go through a convoluted cloning process to achieve SSD as boot and HDD as data storage?

Do I have to go through a convoluted cloning process to achieve SSD as boot and HDD as data storage?

As others have already answered, no.

Put the SSD in your Mac in an available bay and install a New Mac OS X and your Applications on it.

If you prefer, you can avoid restoring from your backup by leaving your 320GB Hard drive alone, and just pointing User Home Directories to it as is. (see the cited article for "Recipes")

If you want a little more space, you can delete the about 30GB of Mac OS X and Applications in the following directories on the non-Boot 320GB drive:

/System

/Library (be careful not to delete the similarly-named Folder at ~/Library (where tilde~ is used by the system to indicate "current User".

/Applications

Now that you included that you already have backups, I just would never continue to use such an old small slow drive as the 320 is. I would call that out of date and possibly on a last leg if nothing else.

Seeing how you are in the habit of clean installs - also nice to know and to hear up front, an SSD is just a fast small device, though it does if you want it in a drive bay require a 2.5" Icy Dock adapter to properly fit.

You might be surprised but there are people without backups, with no experience in clean install or initializing a drive.

I would also not rely on TimeMachine, it is not without some known issues.

There are over 100K files that go in that 30GB system that take forever to move to Trash and again to empty the Trash, which to copy (clone) to another drive would be over and done - and you could once you are certain the SSD is working and backed up - a perfect time to clone an SSD, and an SSD should be, is immediately after a clean install. Figure you know that, true of any system- By having a dedicated system - and the system does not change that often - you can always boot from the backup clone or restore it. Say you try Yosemite and have trouble.

The ONLY think that is unique about SSD is all of them should have spare cells, over provisioning, need TRIM enabled and OS X does not for 3rd party SSDs plus disables programs that do enable TRIM now in 10.10 Yosemite.

I will say this: leave /Users/my-home-account/Library on the SSD where the improved speed performance will help and your DATA drive would be all other folders and type of files besides those stored in ~/Library like Documents, Movies, Video and Pictures.

Yes, that is the less complex way but takes longer.

you want simple? just buy a 500GB $225 Samsung EVO

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E500B-AM/dp/B00OBRE5UE/

There use to be, and still can be, reasons to split the OS and apps from the data drives.

You want speed, then even SATA III with 500MB/sec read/writes, or XP941 with 900MB/sec writes, and 1000MB/sec reads cannot be beat. And you could not fit data onto or justify the cost when an SSD was too small and when 500GB cost $1500.

SSD Blade Drive for "Classic" Mac Pro

Most PCIe cards costs $79-299 and add a level of complexity that the XP941 adapter does not though.

But you do this all the time, but just never had a dedicated system boot drive before. When 15K SCSI drives were small and fast and ideal, and higher cost, the whole idea of using cheaper drives for data came to desktop. It was used already before then on other systems for years.

Using the drive bays, SATA II and 250MB/sec is still an improvement. But even new 4TB drives are 150MB/sec and above. Back when 320GB drives were used they were not even able to achieve 100MB/sec, more like 80MB/sec. And SSD has a lot of other benefits. So yes today's SSD will make a difference.

I would just clone to 500GB SSD and try it! your last clean install was less than a year ago and yet still using older drives that are slow. Small SSDs have not without firmware and controller changes in the last two years able to perform as fast as the 250GB and larger. Larger SSD, more channels. An SSD has 4 channels on 128GB but 8 channels on 250GB which can all act simultaneous and concurrently to shovel I/O. Plus near-zero seeks and access times, and 90,000+ I/Os per second.

128GB $80 will work and make a difference though if price is the main concern and not speed. Also, with an SSD free unused space is more important. A deleted file is not "deleted" and the SSD "page" (NAND) is not freed up until it is trimmed.