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Mac Pro upgrade questions... SSD - boot disk

I will be upgrading my early 2009 Nehalem Mac Pro since all the files it's loaded with seem to be slowing it down. I'm an illustrator and do tons of big photoshop files.


My plan is to put the main startup boot drive onto an SSD (450 G Samsung 850 EVO) and also add another 2 TB Western Digital Black drive.


So I would have the disk array as follows:


drive bay 1 - SSD drive with OS and a 75 Gig partition for a photoshop scratch disk

drive bay 2 - 650 G HDD - which was the original startup OS boot drive

drive bay 3 - 1 TB HDD with files

drive bay 4 - 2 TB HDD as Time Machine

I don't want to try any kind of RAID, since I don't have the required skills for that and I've heard if a file crashes it's gone forever.

I want to keep Snow Leopard, since I've heard so many bad reports from the Adobe photoshop community about users who regretted leaving SL for Lion or Mavericks. To have a slowed down photoshop would be fatal to my work flow.


So I don't know if I should install the OS onto the new SSD drive using a Snow Leopard install disk - if I should just clone the OS system from my current startup drive?


And if I do wind up having the OS on two different HDDs, is that problematic? Can I leave the OS system folder on both HDDs?


I guess in general I'm still very confused about how to add in all the various applications like Mail and Wacom drivers etc. I assume it's not as easy as just dragging the User folder from one HDD to another? Is that at all workable - or would that be a disaster? The same for all the other apps I use. I know Photoshop has all kinds of extensions that live in User folders in the Library.


Thanks for any guidance about how to successfully upgrade. I've been looking over the macperformaceguide site - but it seems to oversimiplify some things a bit.


Thanks!


John Nez

www.johnnez.com

Mac Pro (2009 Nehalem), Mac OS X (10.6.2), Wacom Intuos, Umax Powerlook III, Epson 2200 etc, etc, etc...

Posted on Oct 8, 2015 12:17 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Oct 9, 2015 7:06 AM

Your Mac can have as many different Boot drives as you wish to connect to it. They can have the same version of Mac OS X, or different versions. There is no conflict because there is no "magic place" where the Boot System lives. Your Mac will boot from the drive last specified in:

System Preferences > Startup Disk.


For peak performance, Applications should be in the Applications folder on the Boot Drive. What you start to split off and store elsewhere is User files.


It gets a little complicated because the Accounts data (what are the Usernames, where are their Home folders) is stored on the Boot Drive. If you are not careful about it, you can end up with multiple different sets of Accounts on different Boot drives.


I am a big believer in having your Time Machine drive in an external enclosure, so that it shares as little Hardware (including Power supply) with your main computer as possible. The interface to the Time Machine Drive does not have to be particularly fast. Many users have USB-2 enclosures and it is fine. I use FireWire-800 to mine, which allows it to run at nearly the speed of the Drives.


Forums are a lightning rod for people with problems. For every complaint about moving ahead to a newer Mac OS X, there are dozens to hundreds who did that and never had regrets, never looked back. After a few revisions, most version of Mac OS X have settled down nicely. [Except 10.7, which I loathe. It was an attempt to move down the path toward merging Mac OS X and the iOS system from phones, and it has many "great new features" that were softened or removed at next major revision.]


To evaluate a different version of Mac OS X, you need to weigh the added features and benefits for you, versus the inevitable inconvenience of it being different, and having to adjust. Your Mac will continue to do the things it did when you first brought it home. But if your needs expand, you may have to upgrade to a later Mac OS X, and ultimately, to newer Hardware.


Some users are starting to encounter problems with Safari 5 from Mac OS X 10.6.8 being refused by their bank or by amazon for being "too old".

1 reply
Question marked as Best reply

Oct 9, 2015 7:06 AM in response to John Nez

Your Mac can have as many different Boot drives as you wish to connect to it. They can have the same version of Mac OS X, or different versions. There is no conflict because there is no "magic place" where the Boot System lives. Your Mac will boot from the drive last specified in:

System Preferences > Startup Disk.


For peak performance, Applications should be in the Applications folder on the Boot Drive. What you start to split off and store elsewhere is User files.


It gets a little complicated because the Accounts data (what are the Usernames, where are their Home folders) is stored on the Boot Drive. If you are not careful about it, you can end up with multiple different sets of Accounts on different Boot drives.


I am a big believer in having your Time Machine drive in an external enclosure, so that it shares as little Hardware (including Power supply) with your main computer as possible. The interface to the Time Machine Drive does not have to be particularly fast. Many users have USB-2 enclosures and it is fine. I use FireWire-800 to mine, which allows it to run at nearly the speed of the Drives.


Forums are a lightning rod for people with problems. For every complaint about moving ahead to a newer Mac OS X, there are dozens to hundreds who did that and never had regrets, never looked back. After a few revisions, most version of Mac OS X have settled down nicely. [Except 10.7, which I loathe. It was an attempt to move down the path toward merging Mac OS X and the iOS system from phones, and it has many "great new features" that were softened or removed at next major revision.]


To evaluate a different version of Mac OS X, you need to weigh the added features and benefits for you, versus the inevitable inconvenience of it being different, and having to adjust. Your Mac will continue to do the things it did when you first brought it home. But if your needs expand, you may have to upgrade to a later Mac OS X, and ultimately, to newer Hardware.


Some users are starting to encounter problems with Safari 5 from Mac OS X 10.6.8 being refused by their bank or by amazon for being "too old".

Mac Pro upgrade questions... SSD - boot disk

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