Mac Pro :: Which Is Better Scratch On Boot Drive Or A Slow Dedicated Drive?
Apr 7, 2008
Here's another speculative question for if/when I get a Mac Pro:I don't forsee myself needing the multiple terrabytes of storage most of you guys seem to have , since I'm still doing OK with just the stock 250GB that came with my G5 Quad + an external 120GB. I'll probably get a 750GB drive for boot, apps, and most files (leaning toward SpinPoint F1 750; the new 640GB WD also seems enticing).So, here's my Q: which would be a better setup for apps like Photoshop as well as the OS (I've read you can relocate the swap file?), performance-wise (both in terms of app speed, and keeping the OS from hanging on a busy disk) - using the slow stock 320GB as a more dedicated scratch disk (possibly just a partition on it, with other partitions for Windows), or using the free space on the faster, but non-dedicated, boot and storage disk?
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Jan 25, 2009
I decided that I couldn't wait for Gainestown and ordered a 2.8x8 MP today. I'm going to get another 8GB of RAM (I assume 10GB in matched pairs will still perform at full speed). My real dilemma is a Boot/Storage solution-I'm moving from a Dual 867 G4, so all my current drives, both internal and external are IDE, which basically means I'm starting over as far as internal drives goes. The G4 power supply gave out so I'm getting this external enclosure to put my old drives into for file recovery. As far as new drives go, I can't figure out what to do. I'll spare you my million iterations of drive configs I've sketched over the past two days.
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Jun 26, 2009
I used to have boot camp on my machine and now I reinstalled everything like brand new. But it still shows that dedicated space as windows hard drive. I wish to eliminate this and just let my original be the only one.
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Jun 26, 2014
I replaced my beloved 2009 Mac Pro Nehalem with a brand new iMac 27" with Core i7@3.5 Ghz, 24 GB Ram, GeForce GTX 780M and a 3TB Fusion Drive.Big problem: the boot time is 2 min and 48 seconds, yes 168 seconds.I used Migration assistant to configure this machine from my last MacPro TimeMachine backup.
Apart from boot time, the iMac works fine and the disk tests with Blackmagic show a writing speed of 300 mb/s and a reading speed of 580 mb/s.. Nothing else seems wrong, but the boot time is terrible.
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Mar 17, 2010
why does bootcamp boot up slow without optical drive hooked up?
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May 12, 2009
I had a MBP with a 7200 RPM, 320 GB Hitachi Hard drive. I sold the MBP and got a white nvidia MB, but I kept the 7200 RPM drive and used it in the white MB (I did not reinstall the OS). Everything works fine, but I've noticed that it takes a very long time to boot. From the time I turn the MB on, to the time the spinning disk appears, it takes approx. 60 seconds. Other than that, the MB works fine. Should I do a clean install of Leopard. Would this help the slow boot time?
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Feb 1, 2012
If I have iTunes on an SSD drive (the boot drive in my Mac Mini), can it read the music library on a second rotational hard drive? I'd like not to have the large music library on a 120GB SSD drive.
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May 30, 2008
I've been hearing good things about the Spinpoint Drives and the 750GB ones are coming down in price.Here is my current setup1 - 500MB Drive - Leopard2 - 320MB Drive - Vista 643 - 500MB Drive - FAT32 (Shared, Irrelevant)I plan on replacing drives 1 and 2 with 750GB Spinpoint drives.My question is, can I boot off of the Leopard dvd and put in Drive 1 and NewDrive1 and just clone it, and do the same for Drive2 and NewDrive2 and clone it? And then go into Leopard and resize the HFS partition, and go into Vista and resize the NTFS partition?
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Dec 25, 2010
This is my first time posting on the forums here, however I've gotten through many a problem in the past. I haven't really been able to find anything that addresses my specific issue, Here is my situation: I got a new iMac after my first one died on me (R.I.P.) the hard drive from the first one is still good and I'm using it via an external enclosure. The new iMac came and I needed to start using it ASAP (school/work) before being able to migrate using the old HD (had to wait on the enclosure to get here.) Now that I'm able to do so (migrate) I'm having a lot of trouble. Is it because I started a new user account? Do I need to wipe the new HD and start from scratch? Migration assistant gave me the option to replace existing user which I chose, however that did not seem to work. I've done it a couple times and tried a couple different ways and the only thing I've been able to do is have the option of booting up using either user. What do I need to do to get everything I need from my old HD? The biggest problem I'm having is getting my new iTunes to find my iPhone backup (contacts, notes etc.) from my old computer/HD along with the whole 2 user thing?
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Jan 30, 2009
I have a first generation iMac G5 and it come with 80GB of internal storage. The drive is so full that I rarely have more than 2 GB available. Even seeing 1 is becoming hard. I checked the size of all the areas of the computer and together all the files visible on the Macintosh HD only amount to about 61GB This leaves anywhere between 17-19GB (counting the way they measure GB) of space that is not accounted for. I understand there are hidden system files and other things that are not visible to the Finder, but this number seems outrageous. I was thinking of backing up my entire computer. Zeroing out the hardrive and reinstalling the OS and starting from scratch. If I wanted to do this maintaining the same documents files applications preferences and users.
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Jan 7, 2010
My friend gave me his old Apple cube G4 + 15" Cinema display in like 1000 pieces. Its completely teared apart. I tried a lot, but it doesn't work. The original IDE cable wasn't included, so I bought one for 2 cents. It should work or not? Maybe the powersupply. I'm not sure. I don't believe actually that the hardware itself, like the motherboard is broken. When everything is into place and I connect the cube to the powersupply it boots immediately. I don't have to do anything. Harddrive spins and the superdrive makes some noise as well. This repeats itself every 5 seconds. The screen is connected and gets power through DVI, but no display. Both the cube and display have touch enabled buttons to switch it on, but they do not respond (I guess).. Motherboard gives 2 light. DS1 is green, DS2 is red.
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Apr 20, 2009
I have two WD 640gigs and the stock WD 500, and I am having trouble deciding on the the optimum configuration. I am open to suggestions. I use my computer for general use as well as for my video editing and graphic design hobbies if that info helps.
I am curious as to the benefits of of the following:
Drive 1 (640)
partition 1: 150gig for OS
partition 2: Bootcamp
remainder: Offline storage
Drive 2 (640)
partition 1: Applications
remainder: music/photos
(scratch disk here?)
Drive 3: (500)
Time machine
Would there be a noticeable benefit to having the applications being separate from the OS boot drive? What if anything else should be split across multiple HDs to increase speed? I've heard of moving the swap file from elsewhere on the forum but I am not sure as to what exactly that is nor the benefits of doing it.
My final question(s) is how exactly I could go by moving my application folder to another drive separate from the OS drive? Just drag and drop? What is this deal with making an alias?
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Mar 8, 2012
My internal 1TB hard drive on my iMac is dead and I don't have the money to replace it at the moment. I have everything backed up on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine. As a workaround for the time being,Is there any way I can install the system on the external drive and use that as the boot drive without erasing the Time Machine Backups? It seems to me I would have to have two partitions for the external drive, one for the system, and one for Time Machine. But is there any way to add a partition without erasing the existing one with Time Machine only on it?
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Nov 15, 2010
When I travel I would generally take a small travel drive that is clone of my white MacBook as a rescue drive.Now that I have the MBA I am wondering if I could just clone my 11.6 MBA to a 64 GB flash drive and then if the worst happened I could reverse clone from the flash drive to the MBA.
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Jan 21, 2009
I have a relatively new Mac Pro with a 320gb sata system drive. I'm giving some thought to getting a SSD and making it my system drive for booting and applications (including Photoshop CS4), and using the 320gb drive to store photos and videos.
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Mar 18, 2010
I'm still working out the details on purchasing a new MacPro. My Apple sales rep tells me that I can greatly increase the launch speed of applications and the system OS by purchasing 2 hard drives and using Disk Utility to stripe them together into a "software RAID". They claim it will be faster and more reliable than a single SSD. I know I've asked this question before, but the answers were over my head. I don't know anything about SATA raid cards, or SSD's except for their benefits. But I'm pretty sure I can stripe two drives together and make a software RAID.
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Aug 22, 2010
Looking at current SSD's and they do seem to offer exceptional performance. Have a little spare budget after the 6-core purchase and was wondering..
Add a (modest)
SSD as a boot and app disk?
SSD as a working/scratch disk?
Now - we all would like the biggest, fastest etc etc. But taking another view,ie in 6 months time there are going to be cheaper, faster,bigger, better value for money. So - for design CS4/5, 3D...looking for drive big enough to make worthwhile testing the water. Still a bewildering amount of options out there. A starting point seems to be 60G OCZ vertex 2 ?
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Dec 20, 2007
This is bad and old, and full of lessons about backing up. Anyway, internal boot drive crashed a week ago, and internal optical drive is busted. New external LaCie dvd burner works fine, but all attempts to start up from Tiger, Leopard and Diskwarrior installation disks just end up back in OS10.3 on my external LaCie FW drive. I've tried many things: unplugged everything; switched external LaCie to USB (wouldn't boot), unplugged power from internal optical drive so Mac wouldn't look there first (somebody suggested that). Attempts to start up installers from mounted DVDs result in installer screen with restart button, which, when clicked on, results in... you guessed it... boot back to dreaded 10.3 system. Night owls and westcoasters, I am up for hours yet, pulling hair.
Information:
G5 Dual 2GHz
Mac OS X (10.4.3)
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Apr 27, 2012
Last week I finally upgraded from 10.6 to 10.7, but now my Mac Pro (2008) won't boot properly. It'll start to boot with the gray screen and the Apple logo, but then the entire screen goes gray and it just locks up there. However, if I reboot and hold down the Option key to bring up the list of bootable drives that works fine. I've checked my Startup Drive settings and the proper drive is selected. why it won't boot on it's own anymore? Holding down the Option key is getting old.
Info:
Mac Pro - Octo Core, Mac OS X (10.5.6)
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Mar 28, 2010
I run SSD/HDD, my HDD in the optibay is broken, I stuck it in a external and it makes finder freeze, it got bumped around too much so I want to put a new one back in the 'correct place' for a spinner, and stick the SSD in the optibay.(I figure the extra 2% of shock protection offered by the orange rubber circle things is worth the trouble of moving everything).
I am also going to buy a WD 3 platter 1TB laptop drive, and I read that they fit fine in the regular spot in MBP's (I'm going to open and measure in a min.)Anyways, there's no BIOS, only EFI, so how to I pick what drive to boot from? with 10.6 is it as simple as holding option down on boot, and picking my 'OSX' HDD, and then it will auto boot from that until I specify otherwise? (I ask because before 10.6 people on here were always talking about how to switch boot drives.)
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May 10, 2010
I have an external USB drive attached to my iMac. I've noticed that whenever there's heavy read/write activity on the drive (such as un-raring a large file or transcoding a video that's stored there), my whole system feels sluggish.
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Apr 4, 2009
About six months ago I ran into the problem a lot of people face with a macbook, where my itunes library was taking up an unreasonable portion of my internal hard drive. I took the easy way out, and just got a 500gb usb seagate portable. Now being that I'm a dj, and I'm always producing tracks and remixes on the go I needed to have my music with me all the time so I velcroed the drive to the back of my mac and basically always left it on and treated it like a second partition.
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Jan 9, 2010
I bought a MacAlly GS350SUAB hard drive enclosure for the firewire 800 port. Before I made the purchase, I looked around for some FW800 drive xbench scores and found a few results:
[URL]
When I ran the xBench disk test on my drive, I was unimpressed. They weren't much better than when I plugged it in using the USB port.
Uncached Write34.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write43.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read18.11 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read46.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
I thought maybe xBench was sucking, so I timed how long it took to write a 831MB file to the drive using both USB and FW800, and it was actually faster (marginally) on USB. FW800 took 30 seconds, while USB took 28. Something doesn't seem right. Does anyone have any thoughts on why this could be? I do have a FW400 audio interface hooked up, but that is of course plugged in to the FW400 port and shouldn't make a difference. The hard drive I'm using came out of a Seagate FreeAgent. Is it possible it's just a really slow drive?
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Feb 6, 2012
When i copy files to my usb flash drive, the speed is very slow.It may take a few minutes to copy a 350mb file. I have formatted the drive to mac os extended. I had formated it to fat 32 with the same results.
I have mac os x, lion, the latest update, this has been happening for the last few months, can't remember when did the problem started.
[Code]...
Info:
mac pro, Mac OS X (10.6.5), mac pro dual core 2.66 ghz intel xeon, 10 gb of ram, nvidia 8800
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May 17, 2012
I have a 2010 Macbook Air. Why does my new USB 3.0 flash drive only get 12Mb/sec speed, but my old 2.0 gets 480Mb? The new drive is backwards compatible.
Info:
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Jun 8, 2012
I recently replaced my stock HDD (500GB) with a 750GB. I went into the recovery partition, and did a disk copy. I figured cloning the disk would be the best way to do things. When it was done, I rebooted, and booted from the new drive (which was in an external enclosure). It was a little slow, but I didn't think anything of it. I opened up the case for my MBP and switched the drives. When I booted up after switching them, the boot-up process was very slow, and when OSX finally booted, everything was very slow (lagging) and unresponsive. I kept getting the "Grey Screen of Death" telling me to force shut-down my laptop. I have switched the drives back, and everything is working fine now, but I'm curious as to what may be causing the new drive not to work properly. Has this happened to others? Have I missed a step or 10?Should I maybe have used Carbon Copy Cloner instead of Mac's built-in disk copy?
Info:
MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 17-inch i7 Core, 8GB RAM (mid-2010)
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Jun 22, 2014
I have a number of network drives that I use regularly to store / backup photos. Once connected they work fine but connection takes upto 20 / seconds. Is this normal?
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Mar 29, 2010
i have a small mac office with a PPC G5 and an intel G5 as my two main boxes. I currently work from a very slow raid network box - no screen, just a networked hard drive really. problem is that it is really slow working live form it. Everything is fine when I copy files to my machine first then work on it.
I can't do this as I'm in the graphics field, and all my links, pics, blah blah are on the server - linking to things like InDesign etc.i need to upgrade in here and add a new machine, but not sure on which way in terms of software for my old G5.The PPC G5 is to become my server (its got to be better than my current network server). As per software tho, because its a non-intel G5, i read that i cannot upgrade to latest software. I'm currently running 10.4.11.
Do I, or, Should I, or for what reasons - would I upgrade to a 'server' software, rather than leave it as its current tiger 10.4.11 software (non software)basically, are there major security, network, etc features of the server OSX over non-server OSX?
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Aug 27, 2010
Just finished setting up my new 27" iMac and the last piece of the puzzle is to setup Time Machine. I have an external 500GB hard drive that Im not using (even though my hard drive is 1TB, Im only using 157GB right now so the 500GB should be fine). My concern is...will it slow down the computer when its backing up since the drive is USB? Would it be worth buying a Firewire 800 external drive (~$150)?
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Oct 26, 2010
I know how to fix this problem, I was just wondering if anyone knows WHY it happens.
I have a network drive that I use on my iMac and every time it's nearly full, my WHOLE machine becomes unusably slow. I mean, even opening a finder window can take up to a minute. Just deleting a couple of files off the network drive will fix the problem. Unfortunately, it can take up to an hour just to delete a file because everything is so slow, including the actually deleting of the file.
I don't have an system files on the drive, just a bunch of video files and personal documents.
I was just curious why the network drive being slow would impact the whole system? It just seems weird to me.
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