Hard Drive Advice

[4rephotographer]

Very happy to have received my mini this morning, it wasn't supposed to be here until Monday.

I'm looking for some advice on how to set-up my hard drives in the future. I do very little video work, but lots of photography. Right now I'm running Lightroom 3 with my photo catalog on a 1TB FW800 external as my previous MBP didn't have the HDD room. I bought the 2.7ghz i7 mini with the stock 500GB 5400 hdd with the intent to upgrade to a SSD boot drive.

What would you guys suggest for my needs, I think the little big disk would be overkill since I don't do much video work? 128SSD as a boot and then the 500GB as a media drive and use the 1TB as a backup?

 

[marzer]

That's exactly how I'd set it up given those drives. But in the mean time, for boost in performance, I'd configure the two internal 500GB's in RAID 0 (for a full 1TB) and use the FW as the backup drive.

 

[monokitty]

That's exactly how I'd set it up given those drives. But in the mean time, for boost in performance, I'd configure the two internal 500GB's in RAID 0 (for a full 1TB) and use the FW as the backup drive.

He doesn't have dual 500GB drives - just a single 500GB drive.

128SSD as a boot and then the 500GB as a media drive and use the 1TB as a backup?

I'd go this route myself as well.

 

[4rephotographer]

Thanks, yes it just the one internal drive right now. Would the 5400rpm be sufficient for media as long as the program is running of the SSD?

 

[marzer]

He doesn't have dual 500GB drives - just a single 500GB drive.

Well I would definitely skip the RAID 0 then

Oops, didn't realize you could get an i7 in the non-server mini, that's pretty sweet.

 

[Lokheed]

Oops, didn't realize you could get an i7 in the non-server mini, that's pretty sweet.

Yeah, but it's still a dual core. The server is a quad.

 

[4rephotographer]

Yeah, but it's still a dual core. The server is a quad.

Yeah, I do like to do some mild gaming so I had to go with the dedicated gpu, it was a tough decision though.

 

[mooseeka]

I replaced mine with seagate 500gb hybrid ssd for $100..twice as fast now at least

 

[marzer]

I replaced mine with seagate 500gb hybrid ssd for $100..twice as fast now at least

That sounds like good compromise to the high cost of SDD's. Have you done any benchmarks to test the performance gains over the standard HD?

 

[Adamantoise]

That sounds like good compromise to the high cost of SDD's. Have you done any benchmarks to test the performance gains over the standard HD?

I have this drive too, honestly it's not too amazing.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, it preforms well ... I boot in about 20-30 seconds, and my frequently accessed programs open quickly.

It's just that it's still not an SSD. You're going to have to deal with slow write speeds when transferring data.