2nd drive on 09 server questions

[camardelle]

Just purchased a late '09 server model at the marketplace. It's awesome and I'm sure I'm under utilizing it as a desktop computer but it was priced right and I was super stoked with the deal.

It has two 500 gig drives. I've never had a system with a second hard drive and am curious how it works. Once the primary drive fills, will it automatically start to put data onto the second drive? Can I use the second drive to store only video I download, and just click on the icon to get to them when needed which should help keep the primary drive "clean"?

Thanks in advance for your help. Not a computer dummy, but this is a new situation for me. All input is welcomed.

 

[keysofanxiety]

By default there will be one boot drive with the OS on it. The second hard drive will be visible just like any external drive would be, except it'll have a different icon.

You can set up a Fusion drive to merge both drives as a logical volume, which will swap between the two as and when necessary. However this is a bit pointless if you've got 2x500GB HDDs because there won't be any performance benefit (Fusion drive is normally designed for SSD/HDD to increase real-world performance at a lower storage cost). Furthermore if one drive fails with Fusion, the whole thing goes down. It'd be a real hassle that could simply be solved by fitting a 1TB HDD instead.

With your current setup, just think of it as a 500GB HDD and another 500GB HDD that you can drag-and-drop to when necessary.

 

[camardelle]

Thanks for the quick response. I download tons of instructional vids from YouTube and needed to get them off my iMac. The iMac runs so much faster now that I've cleaned the drive on it by transferring the vids to my Mini. I'll drag and drop as needed to keep performance at peak on the boot drive on my Mini.

Thanks again for the help!

 

[adam9c1]

The computer has two separate hard drives.
If you are looking for redundancy you can, start fresh and create an RAID1 array (data will be mirrored/cloned between the two drives) and when that is done the operating system will see the two drives as a single drive.

Another thing you can utilize the second drive for is Time Machine (backup) of the first drive... or simply as additional storage. You can also repartition the first drive to a smaller one, and keep your "data" on the second partition while keeping the OS partition lean.

 

[camardelle]

Thanks Adam, and thanks for the deal. I've already got the second drive close to 60% full of vids. It's going to fill up fast. LOL. I've already installed an additional 500gig external for my time machine backup.

 

[saulinpa]

Apple's Disk Utility has RAID Assistant where you can set up the two drives in several ways.
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25871?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

 

[California]

Thanks Adam, and thanks for the deal. I've already got the second drive close to 60% full of vids. It's going to fill up fast. LOL. I've already installed an additional 500gig external for my time machine backup.

If those are OEM or eight year old original drives from the 2009 2.53ghz Mac Mini Server, replace 'em. I would NEVER trust my data to an ancient drive that belonged to someone other than myself... you have no way of knowing how much use the drives had.

I owned that model for a short time a few years ago... frankly hated not having the DVD drive.
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