Mac Pro HDD Configuration

[Fedge]

Well, the anticipation of my new mac pro arriving has become so bad that I've resorted to spec-ing out the machine with my existing HDDs. I've got a total of eight HDDs, four of which I'm planning on sticking into the Mac Pro. The stock apple drive is a 250GB, 8MB cache drive (i seem to recall anyway). I have another SATA II, 250GB, 16MB cache drive as well.

In the opinions of some of the very knowledgeable forum members, would it more beneficial to use the 16MB cache as the boot drive, or as the scratch drive? I've been debating whether or not the added performance would better suit the OS and it's components, or the aperture libraries, and PS and Final Cut scratches.

Any thoughts?

 

[kered22]

Well if you want the system to launch even faster and apps to launch even faster, then make it the bootup.

If not, then make it the scratch.

 

[mistafreeze]

i plan on throwing the 250 stock apple drive into an external SATA usb drive, or sell on eBay. 8 meg cache is a bit rough. zipzoomfly you some 400gb drives (not as nice as 500's but damned cheaper) i plan on getting a full set, + one external 400 for time machine when leopard comes out.

 

[hal0n]

i plan on throwing the 250 stock apple drive into an external SATA usb drive, or sell on eBay. 8 meg cache is a bit rough. zipzoomfly you some 400gb drives (not as nice as 500's but damned cheaper) i plan on getting a full set, + one external 400 for time machine when leopard comes out.

i just got 2 500gb-ers and they were pretty reasonable at <200$ each

 

[Fedge]

I imagine that the 16MB cache would certainly help the boot process, and the launching of applications. But would the scratch drive also see a significant performance increase? How often does the boot drive read/write to the drive compared to the scratch drive? My guess is that the scratch drive does so much more often.

 

[milozauckerman]

When I checked the stock drive in one at an Apple location, it was a 16MB cache version of the Western Digital Caviar line.

 

[Fedge]

When I checked the stock drive in one at an Apple location, it was a 16MB cache version of the Western Digital Caviar line.

Oh, that's good news. Maybe this is a moot issue for me. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Abulia]

With that many drives (not sure if you need the space) I'd make a RAID grouping for some performance gain and leave the odd disk out as a scratch volume. Kinda the best of both worlds.

This presumes, of course, you have the proper drives for a RAID configuration.

If you don't want to go down that path then, all things being somewhat equal, I'd make the higher RPM drive your boot drive vs cache size. If they're all the same RPM then place the higher cache sized drive as your boot.

 

[Glen Quagmire]

I'm going to be using the Apple-supplied drive (the 160GB model in my Mac Pro) for Windows, as I don't anticipate using Windows all that often (so the lack of speed, relatively speaking, won't matter as much).

Both my OS X drive (250GB) and my data drive (500GB) will be 16MB cache Seagate 7200.10s.

 

[slughead]

250GB stock as the boot with 100 as NTFS for Windows XP
500GB for my user folder--holds my itunes and dvd collection
300GB x 2 (600GB) in RAID 0 for my work

Hard drives are freakin cheap these days.