Hardware :: Setup For Multiple External Drives - Organize
Aug 27, 2010
I would like to sort out all my drives and keep the organisation simple... it's recently turned into a bit of a mess after my hard drive on the iMac went into melt-down (fixed but having other issues... see other post! ) and as it had difficulty in backing up (for several months!) etc I did a mini panic of just saving my most important stuff on other drives - sometimes it would save on one drive but not other stuff so then had to use another drive etc... I have all my files etc but it's a bit of a mess... sooooooo. I have different things on different drives etc and it would be interesting to see how others organise themselves if they have multiple external drives. Which is best to use for time-machine back-ups and the other to keep all my photo's, videos and general other work on. I would like to keep my computer free of most of my work... maybe just have the current projects kept there. so far I have 53GB of photo's (I dabble in photography and work as a retoucher) I usually keep some original images and then there's the retouched or best images in separate folders. I'm studying digital media as well (BA) and while websites don't take that much space, the 3D stuff did and I've started doing stop motion animation ... then trying out different formats etc I end up with a huge amount of GB used up with .mov files (I'm new to moving images!) I have two desktop Western Digital Studios drives - 1.5TB and 500GB
I did used to just have the 500GB and kept the time-machine/backups on this disc and I recently switched this over to the 1.5TB but I'm wondering if I really need all that space just for back-ups - I can't personally see wanting a back-up from a year ago... a couple of months back maybe so should I switch my back-ups to the 500Gb drive and keep all my images/video/docs etc on the 1.5TB instead? also have 2 Western Digital portable drives - 320GB each. use one for Uni/work which means I can transfer large files to and from work computers to my home computer and I don't have to lug my macbook around ... plus the Uni doesn't have the same software versions as I do and it's easier just to take the files in rather than my laptop etc. I use one for keeping movies on - it's more convenient to keep my DVD films on the drive rather than keep taking dvd's out of the case etc... so my dvd collection is in a box on the wardrobe How do others organise themselves?
And then mirroring the TB drives with a OS X software Raid 1.
But, if one drive crashes, is the other drive instantly usable? How do you separate or recover the "mirrored" drive in a Raid 1?
Also, can you do a Raid 1 with a drive on an SATA, and then a FW800 with such different transfer speeds, will the FW800 drive be able to write as fast as the SATA one, or will the SATA one have to slow down?
What is the best way to have an internal drive in the Mac Pro, and then have it real-time mirrored on an external? Or is this not possible.
I have a few external drives for my Macbook Pro. One of the drives is an Iomega MaxMini with USB ports on the back to add drives.
My question is; when I hook up the drives to my laptop I get about 4 drive icons on the desktop for each of the partitions, and when I need to remove them I have to eject them or move them to the trash icon. Is there a way I can put the drives in a folder of some kind that I can just eject and make the desktop look less cluttered?
Ok, so I know that: mkdir .testhiddenfolder will create an invisible folder on my home directory. but how do i do this if i have an external drive called "G-Drive M2" .... is it mkdir G-DriveM2/.testhiddenfolder, or mkdir volumes/G-DriveM2/.testhiddenfolder
sorry if this is a way basic question. I'm totally new to unix and Termianl
This is the third drive that has failed since I was assigned this Mac Pro at work a few weeks ago, and the drive was purchased less than a week ago. The other two were older drives. They would suddenly stop being readable. Sometimes there was a problem ejecting the drive before it stopped becomeing readable (message would say the drive couldn't be ejected because another program is using it, when there were no programs open). One of them eventually mounted again and I recovered some of the files (but some files weren't readable when I tried to copy them). But that was just luck as they all seem now to be consistently unreadable. When I plug them in I get the message: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". same if I plug it into a different computer. And when I try to repair, it shows this: http://i.imgur.com/ivK9d.png. When it happed to the second drive, I just thought it was a fluke... but now a third, brand new drive? Something about the computer must be causing it.
What's the Best Way to Organize Multiple Related Contacts? It may be a Couple or a Family with common Address and Phone, but different names and birthdates. Then I try to put them all in one contact listing.It may be a Large Business where you want to keep track of information about a dozen different people's address, phone, depart, title, email etc. But It still would be nice to be able to pull up one entry with all the business's information.
I'm trying to find the easiest solution to our family music situation. 4 users, 4 devices (ipods, ipad, imac, pc laptops), and 4 different musical song interests. I'm sure there are millions of households that have the same exact situation. I want to be able to pull up only my musical library, not my kid's music, and then easily synch it to my ipod. Everyone in the family wants to do this same thing. I have spent alot of time trying to search the forums/internet and there does not seem to be one "most popular" solution. I did setup iCloud for each family member using a different Apple ID than my main Apple ID, and I'm happy that ALL the music shows up on my ipad. But between iCloud, MobileMe, Home Sharing it all gets very confusing. Some say to setup multiple computer login accounts, and others say to setup 1 playlist for each family member and synch from that playlist. Â
I would think 1 itunes account allows you to easily share a purchased song with 4 users, instead of buying songs twice.Â
So here are a few of my questions-
1-Is it best to have only 1 itunes account and then synch all devices off of 1 main computer? Â
2-Or since we each have iCloud accounts, will they be able to synch their ipods from their own pc laptop?Â
3-And when they synch, what is the easiest way to exclude other users music in itunes? (other than unchecking hundreds of artists)Â
4-Or setup 4 separate computer login accounts on the imac and then keep 1 itunes account? If so, how does this work when they open itunes? Â
I have many Photo's all ready stored on my external HDD, and would like to keep them on my external HDD and not install / store them on my iMac, just use the iMac to view them .
Is there any way I can store / organize / edit my photos just simple stuff , but from my external HDD ..?
I'm continually upgrading my drives to larger drives. While in the time being that is fine, but my disk space usage is also increasing. Rather than replacing my 2TB drives in a year for 4TB drives (or whatever size they may be), I'd love to add more drives.
Right now I have my 'backup' drives in an 8-bay SansDigital eSATA cage. This is fine for backups, but for simplicity and drive speed sake, I'd love to just add more drives to my machine. I'm using up all 5 available SATA ports on my 2010 MP. I don't use the Optical drive much, so got to thinking: what about putting my optical drive into an external firewire/USB housing and plug it in when I need to use it. This would free up one extra drive port, which would suffice for the next 2 years or so.
So, are they are good external casing's that will allow me to use my current MP SATA optical drive? Is this method bootable, what pitfalls might I run into?
I just got a brand new MAC PRO desktop. It came with a 600GB HDD. I purchased a second identical internal 600GB HDD. I wanted to do setup a RAID 1 using these 2 drives. Currently the main drive has the OS and all my other apps installed. I installed the 2nd drive and was fooling with disk utility. I'm not sure how to set this up however. I tried numerous guides online but I just cant figure it out.
MAC PRO (takes up to 4 internal drives) - currently installed 2 identical drives Leopard Using Disk utility
The RAID tab says "online" and the status is green (indicating the RAID is working). However on my desktop i see the 2nd hardddrive mounted with no contents in it. I just want to able to use the 2nd drive as a mirror so this way if one fails I'm still up and running.
I have an (Early 2008) Mac Pro in standard configuration. The hard drive is just about full and would like to add a second internal hard drive.
I have read that some people choose to keep just the OS on one hard drive and everything else on the drive. Is this the best way to go? Which hard drive would the applications go on (with the OS?)?
The main use of this machine is for graphics (Adobe CS3 and Aperture).
I have a mid 2010 Mac Pro with two internal drives. Last night I experimented with boot camp by partitioning 50gb of my startup drive to test Windows out. Worked beautifully with the exception of lacking in some graphical processing power for some of my editing suites like 3ds max and Maya (taking care of that buy replacing the 5870 with an r9 270x).
I decided that I want to make Windows a permanent useful option on my Mac Pro by providing dedicated drives for it. Specifically, I was wondering if it is possible to install Windows on an ssd and then use another hard drive as storage for Windows. For example, can I use a 128gb ssd for my windows startup partition while using another 1.5tb hard drive for Windows applications and stuff?
I'm thinking about getting a Mac Pro tower from apple, and then buying two 500gb hard drives to place them in a raid 0 config. My question is, is setting up raid as easy as taking out the existing hard drive, placing both the new drives into the mac pro, and selecting raid 0 from OSX when I reinstall the operating system?? Or does the Mac have something similar to a Bios setup where I select that?
Currently, I have time machine backing up my iMac on to an external drive.
I also have a third drive filled with movies and music. I would like to set iTunes to play directly off of that drive but I don't want to risk losing that stuff.
Can I set time machine to back up my iMac on HD2 AND ALSO back up HD3 to HD4?
Currently I keep my time machine backup on an external usb hard drive which is a seagate hd in an enclosure I bought a while ago. I want to maintain a second copy of the time machine back up.
Is it better to buy an external RAID enclosure, put the current drive in there, get another drive, and then just have time machine backup to that drive?
Or should I just get another enclosure and another drive? If I do it this way, can I automate the time machine backups across two drives in any way, or I have to manually run it twice?
So I want to setup an (advanced?) network using my existing wired router (sorry, have to use this cause of my IP-Telephone and my ISP), An Airport Extreme for high-speed N wireless to my MBP and an Airport Express for music streaming and slow wireless acces for my ibook and other devices (I don't want to compromise my N-connection for the MBP). I would like to let the existing router handle all the NAT (I barely know what this is) and stuff like that and simply let the Airports act like bridges (or something along thoose lines if possible).. The reson for this is I've heard the extreme has performance issues when going through NAT-handling or using the WAN-port (is it possible to connect the existing router to a LAN-port on the extreme and still have internet acces or does it have to connect to the WAN-port?) The MBP should be able to connect to the express exlusivly for music-streaming to my stereo (if it's possible to connect to the extreme using wireless and somehow the extreme is so smart it routes trough cable to the express that would be even more awsome!). The Ibooks and other devices would connect wirelessly to the express for internet and music streaming.....
My partner and I both have iPhones and iPads but share an iMac, as our contacts and calendars go through iCloud, both gets merged when it comes into iCal and contacts. Do we have to set up separate accounts on the iMac to handle this correctly?
First one was a portable 500gb freeagent, and also I put it in a folder in my 1.5tb time machine drive. Tonight I am updating the second, and I think I'm noticing a problem, but not sure. First of all, when I move my library locatation in preferences to the ext. drive in preferences, and do consolidate library the "info" on a few of the songs still shows a filepath leading to the built in hard drive on my mac (the original library). Also, when I perform the Library>consolidate library function it seems like it copies all of the files that are already on the drive, too. So they only appear in itunes once but they appear in the actual folder more than once, in appended form. Anyone else think this is unnormal. How do you manage a library on mulitple drives? The original reason I did this was to clear some space on my macbook's hard drive, but I'm always too scared to delete the files on it.
Here is what I want to achieve: I have my MBP with a 500GB hard drive that I want backed up to an external 750GB drive (A). Then I have an external 1TB drive (B) that I also wanted backed up to an external 1TB drive (C). Or: Internal -> drive A Drive B -> drive C
Can Time Machine do this all for me or am I going to need a 3rd-party app to help. I know I can easily use TM for doing one of the backups, but will it handle both? If not, what's a good 3rd-party app that will help me accomplish this?
I'm having trouble with getting Windows to understand the partition structure of my USB drive. I formatted it into 3 partitions: One HFS+, the second FAT, and the third also FAT. For some odd reason, though, Windows refuses to recognize the FAT partitions and mount them, ignoring the HFS+ partition it doesn't recognize in the process. Instead, what it's doing is mounting only the FIRST partition on the drive, ignoring anything else there - even if said partition is the GPT protective partition. I'm understandably baffled by this.The reason I'm doing this is to make a "universal" development drive. I tried formatting the whole drive as FAT, which sort of works (my IDE loads from the drive okay, but refuses to update itself, complaining that the profile is in use, only tested on the Mac side). So, I came up with what I thought was the brilliant idea of mixed filesystem partitioning to work around the issue... but of course that doesn't work either.
Does anyone know if it's possible to have two sets of striped drives using a single hardware RAID controller? I'm looking at the ARC-1210 and it seems like you can have more than one set of striped drives, but I'm not positive. My plan is to have two small SSDs set up for the boot drive and two HDDs for storage, each pair set up with RAID 0. Can this be accomplished using a single controller? Note: I'd just use OS X's software RAID but I need to keep the cores freed up for computation. I'm not concerned with redundancy--just speed.
I have an old MBP that I am replacing with a new Retina Display MBP. Last night I did a full backup of my entire MBP (there are actually 2 hard drives in it, I took out the optical drive and used an OWC kit). Today, I restore that backup to my new MBP. I set it to restore everything. However, it only restore the one drive as my new MBP does not have 2 hard drives. I know the 2nd drive is in the Time Machine backup. So how do I manually go in and retrieve those items?
