Advice on Drive Setup: Moving Users & Scratch Disk

[speekez]

My new Mac Pro still has only one drive, the stock 250GB. I'm looking for a little input on drive setup. I'm going to add at least 1 additional drive for now (a 500/750GB Western Digital or Seagate), and a third not long after. I've never used RAID, and not necessarily looking to do that. Computer will be used for editing photography.

I'm thinking of keeping the System and Applications on the stock 250GB. On my last computer, I set up my machine so that Users was on a second hard drive (that way, if my System got corrupted I could wipe out the main disk and reinstall the OS, without wiping out my documents). In Tiger, what's the best way to move Users off the main drive and to a second drive? Or, is this a bad idea or no longer possible? I used to have instructions on how to do this, but I think they are a bit dated. Anyone have a link to a tutorial or any freeware that can do this?

Disk setup would be as follows:

1. Stock 250GB - System, Applications
2. 2nd drive = 500 or 750GB for Users (Documents, Fonts, Itunes Library, etc)
3. 3rd drive = another 500 or 750GB that I can backup the contents of drive #2 to (possibly with Leopard's new backup technology)
+ Timely DVDs to back up the 3rd drive.

Where could I setup a Photoshop scratch disk? I have 5GB of RAM, but a Scratch disk still seems advisable. Maybe a 10GB scratch partition broken off from my 2nd or 3rd drive? Or would it be unwise to borrow a partition from my 2nd and 3rd drive?

Thanks in advance for any questions you can answer.

 

[mad jew]

This hint should help you move your users. As for the scratch disk, I'd use a partition on the third drive since it seems like that's the one that'll be in use the least.

 

[speekez]

This hint should help you move your users. As for the scratch disk, I'd use a partition on the third drive since it seems like that's the one that'll be in use the least.

thanks for the link maybe it's considered a bad idea to move users to another drive... as I haven't heard too many people here mention it . Hmmm.

 

[mad jew]

For the average user I'd say it's a pretty intimidating technique with only small if any benefits. I can see the benefits for you though. So if you think you're up to it (it's less intimidating than it looks) then go your hardest. I can't imagine it'll have any adverse effect on your system. Having said that, keep the link handy because if you ever do reinstall OSX you'll probably want to set this up again obviously.