How do I use WD Raptor for OS/Apps drive and RAID 0 for Home/Data drive

The following article describes how to relocate a Home folder:

http://maczealots.com/articles/home/

Although you certainly can create a mirror RAID with the striped RAID and the external drive. However, you will lose most of the speed benefits of the striped RAID in return for the data redundancy. You should be aware that any data corruption will automatically transfer to the mirror drive. Consequently, it wouldn't be a good idea to relocate the Home folder.

I'm not sure what it is you want to accomplish but unless you are running an enterprise server there's hardly any reason for RAIDs on a home system.

I have run into trouble when mixing un-like drives in a RAID.
Most recently an older Hitachi and newer, different revision of same model.

WD has RE and SE series, and some in this forum early on found that SE pair didn't work in RAID.

Forget the mirror and backup.

All you need, no root required, is NetInfo Manager to change the path of the home directory
will be "/Volumes/vol name/Users/myaccount"

Depending on your type of work, you might want a pair of Raptors in stripped RAID for boot + scratch which works very nicely to improve CS2.

As for /Users, not sure you want or need RAID, I'd use the WD 320GB, and keep it 50% free. As for the Seagate, I did not like mine and put it in FW800-SATA ext. case. That leaves you with room for 2 x Raptors and maybe two WD drives.

RAID both your boot drive AND your data drive, but I would go for a pair of 500GB drives.

There is only one FW bus, and you would have to be using FW800 which still isn't a perfect match. PCIe FW800 (all the ones I saw have sleep issues and can lock up a system on wake from sleep) or better yet would be eSATA PCIe for storage.

4GB RAM (4 x 1GB) plus your OEM 1GB (2 x 512MB ) - or more.

Except for saving space there's no compelling reason to move the Home folder. Apple recommends against it. There's little if any "speed" advantage. I can certainly see maintaining data on another drive. If your striped RAID is used for data storage you will gain a speed benefit especially if you are using large files. But I would not create a mirrored RAID for redundancy. I would simply use scheduled backups to backup the RAID on your external drive. For that I highly recommend Synchronize! Pro X (www.qdea.com) or Deja Vu (www.propagandaprod.com.) I would set up a backup schedule on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Daily for frequently changing data, weekly and monthly for redundancy and archiving changes. Rotate the older backups to DVDs or tape for long-term archival storage. For more on backup strategy visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore.

Except for saving space there's no compelling reason to move the Home folder

Getting the home folder off the boot drive can boost performance and make system backups and restores a lot easier.

I have never, in 4 yrs of having a home folder NOT on the boot drive, run into or suffered any problems. I didn't find any benefit from moving 3rd party applications elsewhere, or tinkering with moving swap file location (which some use to try).

The best and maybe only way to know how something affects your system and performance, is often to do it and experiment. And have backups regardlessly.

For most heavy Photoshop users, having a Raptor RAID boot drive + scratch and plenty of RAM and free disk space is one of the best and easiest configurations.

Well, I do believe there is a 150 GB Raptor drive. However, if the speed you require is for data storage, then why are you spending major bucks to buy the fastest drives for your startup volume? If you move the Home folder from the Raptor to the RAID where's the real speed advantage? Furthermore, with the Home folder and your data on the same "drive" you've lost any multi-tasking benefits for data access.

If you are dead set on having a RAID then use it exclusively for your data storage and leave the OS entirely on the startup volume, which is where it should be. If you require more space on the startup volume (don't know why if you use the RAID for data storage) then replace the current Raptor with the larger 150 GB Raptor. That makes more sense than to buy a second 74 GB Raptor.

Upgrading to Leopard will not leave a moved Home folder alone. Leopard will upgrade any Home folder regardless of its actual physical location. This is true of any Upgrade install.

My biggest concern about what you are doing is that it doesn't sound like it was very well thought out in advance, and that you really have limited knowledge of what you want to do. That alone seems to mitigate against the plan because once implemented it isn't easy to make a change.

I've been reading up on all the raid raptor threads and have decided I do not want to use Raid for anything. I'm thinking of doing this for CS3 and Aperture performance...

1. Boot OS/Home: Raptor 150GB
2. Apps: (CS3 and Aperture) Raptor 150GB
3. Data and scratch: WD 500GB RE2 (possibly 2)

I have a Mac Pro 8 core with 8GB Ram.

Thoughts?

Can CS3 can be custom installed to non-boot drive? yes or no?
Putting apps on a dedicated drive is a waste of drive, and of drive bay.
A number of tests from various users over the years I have never seen a benefit or justification.

I would either keep "home" to minimum or keep it elsewhere.

8 cores may not be ideal for CS3. There are a couple articles, Adobe included, on memory management using more cores.

Boot OS/apps
Data
2 drive scratch RAID.

It depends on the type of work, but I figure anyone springing for $1499 cpu upgrade works with large and professional work load.

RAID is great for scratch. Whether you want $500 for pair of Raptors or $320 for WD RE2s.

You might be more than happy with 4 x WD RE2s.

I figure Leopard and Adobe will take advantage of 8 cores at some point in future upgrades. I'd rather not use Raid on the boot drive.

OK, I'll only keep the more important apps like CS3 and Aperture on the boot drive.

I'm still trying to decide on exactly which drives to purchase.

Raptor 150 or WD 5000KS: Boot/OS/CS3/Aperture
WD 5000KS: Data and other apps
Raptor 150 or WD RE2 Raid: Scratch

Is a scratch disk that important with 8GB Ram? Is 300GB enough for scratch?

Photoshop files of 1GB+ can eat up memory and scratch. And the more drives for scratch, the better.

Some of the limitations are with the bus, bandwidth, and 'swapping' code in and out of different cores that is inefficient.

Compilers can do some, but from the time new hardware (8 cores) to seeing improvements to compiler, and out to software (applications) and OS, can take a year or more but provide in the neighborhood sometimes of 40%. In which time, newer designs will change the equation. Caching and VM will improve with Leopard, but beyond that...?

So... back to "read world" IF you are in the habit of working with 1-2GB images, then a pair of Raptors for boot is helpful, AND 8GB and more of RAM, AND 4-8 drives for scratch. (Think of those Sonnet Port Multiplier controllers and Fusion 500 style case for 5 drives on one port).

If you work with files smaller than 500MB range, your needs are cut way down.

150GB Raptor boot drive. Small. subtract 25% for minimum free space, 140GB formatted, kind of tight for some. But it handles 60% well.

The outer 30% of 465GB (RE2) is also fast and good performance. I partition large boot drives to keep the OS and apps contained in the outer 1/3.

Mac Pro Memory Usage and Performance

If your work flow means doing more than one thing at a time on your Mac Pro, then you will see significant gains if you spend extra to get the 8-core version. Our Photoshop CS3 actions were completed 39% faster on the 8-core when we had 3 other apps busy crunching. This advantage emerges in spite of the memory bus limitations of the 8-core Mac Pro.
http://www.barefeats.com/octopro3.html
CS3: Justifying 8-Cores
http://www.barefeats.com/octopro4.html

Pshop Test G5 Quad 16GB Raptor RAID

Photoshop and multi-core
http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/



Mac Pro 2GHz 4GB 10K Raptor 23" Cinema Mac OS X (10.4.9) WD RE RAID Aaxeon FW800 PCIe MDD-G4 APC RS1500 Vista

Thanks hatter...

I'm going with...

1. Raptor 150GB
2/3. WD RE2 500GB Raid 0
4. original 250GB