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...