Mac Pro :: How Do You Have Your Hard Drives Set Up?
Feb 13, 2009
I'm planning on getting a Mac Pro with multiple hard drives and was thinking about having a main drive for Leopard and documents, one for music, one for video and another for Windows. I was just curious to see how others have theirs set up and any if there is advice to be shared.
I'm looking at the specs page for the MacBook Pro and it reads this...
Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive. Choose a hard drive with a faster speed for greater performance. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability.
Basically suggesting that the HDD option has a performance advantage over the SSD, but is this the case? I always thought SSDs could read & write quicker because they use solid-state flash memory as opposed to hard disks.
I want to go with the 256GB SSD but I want to know how it ranks in speed.
I have a Imac 20 with a small 3.5 hard drive and I have bought a bigger 360 gig 3.5 hard drive to replace the old one. I have the new one in an external case with USB 2.0 right now. Is there some way I can transfer the entire contents of the old hard drive on to the new one and then swap out the old drive with the new drive and not miss a beat?
I have to hard drives in my powermac. And I am running out of space with the one that has the OS on it.
I want to make the 2 internal hard drives i have appear as one so i can still install and use things that say "must have mac OS installed on this drive to use" or whatever.
i've heard of people using RAID to join them, but i want details on how i could do this.
HDD Bay 1: 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s; 7200 rpm; 8MB cache
OSX: Tiger
I need to upgrade to Snow Leopard to be able to use newer Leopard & above only versions of software ie FCP, Aperature, etc.
The issue is that I would like to keep the Tiger OSX as I run Pro Tools LE 7 on it. Upgrading to Snow Leopard would render Pro Tools LE 7 incompatible and I would have to buy it again.
So here's what I'm thinking. I would like to install a secondary HDD in Bay 2 and install Snow Leopard on it.
Is it possible to have OSX Tiger on the HDD in Bay 1 and have OSX Snow Leopard on the HDD Bay 2? Could they each be a different startup to be selected via System Preferences or at bootup? I would only want to run one OS at any given time.
If so what would be a workflow for installing the 2nd HDD and setting it up with OSX Snow Leopard.
Also, compatible hard drives for the 2006 Intel Mac Pros seem to be harder to find now. I called Apple and they no longer sell any compatible internal HDDs.
I would have thought, given the pace of innovation, that we might have had hard drives larger than 1 TB by now. Has anyone heard of any potential rumors?
Looking at Seagate site, even newegg, the hard drives for mac are incredibly more expensive. I doubt the interface is different, so the only other option is how it is formatted.
If the drive is formatted differently, at an extra cost, I am curious if OSX is capable of formatting externals on its own? Can I buy a standard drive and format it natively in OSX?
I only ask, because after coming from Home Premium, several hardware utilities are non-existent.
I have a 15" MBP with 256ssd installed and a 13" MBP with a 250gb 5400 drive. I prefer to use the 13" as my main computer and want to take the 256ssd drive from the 15" and put it in the 13". Then take the 250gb drive from the 13" and put it in the 15" How hard is this to do? I've not done something like this before. Since I'm swapping an ssd with a regular hd is it as easy as following the instructions on this forum, remove the screws and swap the drives? After that's done I'll need to overwrite the 15" software and load the OS and drivers for the 13" on to the ssd drive. Is that as simple as taking the restore disk for the 13" put it in the drive and reinstall the OS? Or, should I just take it to the local authorized Apple Dealer and have them do it? (We don't have an Apple store nearby.
When I was on OS Tiger I had all my iTunes content on an external drive to free space on my iMac, content being 224gig on a 300g external HD. I'm now on Snow Leopard and would like to use the Time Machine facility but it says I don't have enough room to carry out.I still have 224g of iTunes on ext and I have 198g available on a 300g Mac HD. Can I split the iTunes content over the two drives i.e music on one and movies on another? If yes, how? Or, to use Time machine effectively should I look at other options?
Our Mac Pro crashed, and upon reboot, both the internal raid as well as the external firewire drive that happened to be plugged into the machine at the time, are both 'locked' and we cannot unlock them. We've tried toggling the 'user and permission' choices from the 'custom' setting that they are now showing to read/write... and it just snaps back to 'custom'!
Same if we try to change to just READ or just WRITE...etc...nothing...
Just a gray icon of a LOCK under the icons of the drives, and a warning anytime I try to access them, saying I don't have permission to do so.
I even unplugged the firewire drive and plugged it into another computer and it does the same thing! And I even made a new ADMIN and tried changing it with that, to no avail. Everytime I look at either of these drives, those 'users and permissions' toggles are back at 'custom' and they just won't relent!
Oh, and I also flashed PRam and 'Repaired permissions' on the boot drive [yes, the boot drive is working fine]
I need the media that is on these drive... a ton of video media on the internal raid, specifically... So I can't just repartition them from boot disk.
I just recently bought a Macbook Pro about 2 weeks ago. Everything's been working great up until today. First I noticed that my MBP wouldn't recognize my phone when I plugged it into the USB. (Its an Android phone - don't bash me for it) I just thought it was my phone at first. A couple hours later I tried transferring some files to my external hard drive (1TB iomega) and my MBP wouldn't recognize it. I plugged in another one of my external HD (320 GB Maxtor), same problem. I then tried my other external HD (500 GB Western Digital), same problem. I tried a different USB port, different cord, rebooting the mac, nothing seems to be working. It will recognize my ipod touch tho. Being that its happening on 4 different devices, I doubt its the devices themselves. Its not the cord because I tried 2 different ones, 3 if you count the one for my phone which uses micro USB.
I am very new to the mac world so other than the things I have tried already, I don't have a clue what to try next. Oh yea, one more thing, all my hard drives are formatted for pc being that I just recently bought my MBP, I had all these hard drives before my mac. And they have all connected fine to my MBP in the past week or so.
Anyone knows if you can have exclusively one hard drive to run mac and the other to run windows? I know about changing the cd slot to accommodate another hard drive. So I was just wondering if anyone has any idea whether this would work couldn't find anything concerning this online and can I still have the bootcamp thing where you can choose which os to choose from.
I'm trying to share a hardrive from my Macpro to my Imac. I have the sharing preferences turned on and have added the volume I want to share to the "shared folder" list. When I try to access it form my Imac I can see my mac pro but when I connect I can't see any folders.
I tried to share a folder from my Mac Pro boot drive and that worked !!!? I don't know why I can't share files from my other hardrives.
i am very interested in buying a Mac. But I need an external hard drive for my stuff. What are the best 1TB or higher external hard drives for a Mac Book Pro?
I want to thank all of you who have contributed to this forum. Based on the comments made, because I am on a tight budget, I have ordered a quad 2.8 ghz, 320g drive, 2gb ram, ATI 2600 card. Also bought additional 4gb ram.Reasons for this configuration are statements that quad is very fast, and Barefeats tests showing 2600 card faster than NVIDEA 8800 card for programs based on Apple graphics core. The 8800 appears to be faster for games, but I don't play them.I am using the MacPro for Microsoft Office, Firefox, Aperture and Photoshop. Also use Fusion to run Quickbooks and a variety of important PC software not available on the Mac.
I have a 1st generation Mac Pro, 3gHz, 4GB RAM. I'm looking to get another hard drive in the machine, 500GB. I was looking at macsales.com, and I have a preference toward Seagate with my background. Unfortunately, I don't know much about the subtle difference in speed or performance with newer drives (ES-2 Enterprise-Class, for example). I was looking at a couple on there:
500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA II 7200RPM 32MB Cache - 5yr Seagate Warranty 500GB Seagate Barracuda ES-2 Enterprise-Class SATA II 7200RPM Hard Drive with 32MB Cache
Do you have any recommendations for me? Obviously, speed and it being quiet are my top preferences.
I currently have a 2TB WD mirror edition that is setup in RAID 1 so it will mirror all my data. Now I also have a bunch of other drives laying around which I also feel the need to back up and currently I am doing this by doing a whole bunch of dragging and dropping and copying and pasting etc etc etc and this is making me very tired. I know that a setup is possible in disk utility but I am not at all sure about how to configure it so I wont lose any of my data.
Some details about my setup: Mac OS X 10.5.6 PowerPc G5 Harddrives: two 1TB WD MyBooks, and two 500gig WD Mybooks --> these pairs need to mirror each other and make my life less of a hassle.
I got 2 hard drives, my main one has Leopard on it, and my second one has Tiger. Does anyone know how I uninstall Tiger so I can free up some space on the drive?
I often use external hard drives to back up my work. Recently I purchased a 1TB Lacie drive. I took a week to build a lovely new file structure for my work. At the end of this week, I began deleting the old files on other hard drives so as to transfer my new neatly structured work back on. In the midst of this, the brand new hard drive crashed, illiciting only the clicking sound of death.
That hard drive, some of my work (a very small amount but still) and a week's worth of sweat and blood was gone in an instant. The person I took it to to look at it mentioned a power surge as being a possible cause for the crash. Anyway, I returned the lacie and bought a 1T Western Digital Mybook (silver). I then began dumping the old back ups onto this.
A week in and this one is crashed too. No clicking sound of death. It calmly sits on my desk with it's unceasing unblinking blue light and refuses to show up in utilities no matter what I do. So I assume it's a goner also. I'll return it also of course. Is something causing these drives to fail...that exists in my walls? Are there power surges causing my drives to die...? OR is it simply a case of bad luck with my choices of new drives?
I put all the fans up to 1000 but Power Supply stays at 599. Any thoughts why it wont go up? Also whats a safe temp for harddrives? My HD:macintosh drive was around 39C- 41C when I put the fans on higher. Now its at 37 and its only 60degrees out today and my room is already over 70 (dam attic ) i wont be able to use my computer when its 100 out
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 two old hard drives from windows xp machines (one laptop, one desktop). the desktop is so slow it is unusable and the laptop is dead (wont turn on). I want to move data from both drives to my new macbook. Is there any way to do this. I've heard of, and may not understand, how to slave a hard drive, but I have not learned if this is possible between different operating systems.
I was done doing various tasks on the iMac and when I decided to plug in the external hard drive for a Time Machine backup, the drive spun, but was never shown on the desktop.I also tried another external drive and had the same thing happen.
After rebooting (hey, this sounds like Windows!), the drive again showed up on the desktop and Time Machine worked fine.Is an external hard drive not showing up on the desktop a somewhat common issue?