MAC Pro 3 Hard Drive setup?

[Mac709]

A few times I've heard people state splitting your OS, application, and data on 3 different drives can increase performance over a one drive or even three drive setup (Drive 1 OS/Apps Drive 2/3 Data Raid 0) Assuming a single user environment ..... is this true?

If so, for the application drive does one simply drag the application folder from the OS drive and drop it on an empty hard drive?

 

[trainguy77]

If I was doing this what I would do is move the applications folder then create a syslink between the regular location and the new one. This way the system knows where to find it for installations etc. This is what I have done with all the inside folders of my user folder.

 

[hayduke]

A few times I've heard people state splitting your OS, application, and data on 3 different drives can increase performance over a one drive or even three drive setup (Drive 1 OS/Apps Drive 2/3 Data Raid 0) Assuming a single user environment ..... is this true?

If so, for the application drive does one simply drag the application folder from the OS drive and drop it on an empty hard drive?

I would steer clear of RAID0. You can get some speed improvement for disk intensive work, but you can also get really hosed if one drive gets corrupted. Regardless of how you set things up I would make sure that you use at least one of those drives as a back-up. The symlink idea is also a very good one.

 

[Mac709]

I have backup in place via firewire. How does one setup the symlink

Still looking for data to support claim 3 drive setup split OS/Applications/Data provides performance boost?

 

[MikeDTyke]

I have backup in place via firewire. How does one setup the symlink

Still looking for data to support claim 3 drive setup split OS/Applications/Data provides performance boost?

It's a complicated area, depends on the type of work you do/apps you run.

Assuming your 3 drives are identical. I'd do the following.

raid 0 partition across 2 of the drives call them A & B here. Install macos & app directories here. Create a small partition on C for backup macos and app boot partition (ie. only essential apps or ones hard to reinstall). If you lose A or B, you can boot from C. On the rest of C create a Home partition for your homedir and data files. I'm basing this on you saying you take backups to a firewire drive. If you weren't i'd suggest a raid 1 (mirror) setup across 2 of the disks..

Most slowdown in macos performance is in reading from mac libs/ starting apps. There's scenarios depending on your application where a dedicated scratch drive is beneficial. ie. photoshop/aperture.

There's a quick article on http://www.macprojournal.com regarding raid setups, but i'd caution you regarding the results, they are not real world based on the testing he did.

Regarding softlinks Here's a good article based on moving a homedir.
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html