Switching hard drives

[MacDale]

Got a Mac Pro in late March. Just bought a 500gig Hard drive and was wondering if I should change my new drive to my primary drive and make the 250 gig that came with a secondary drive? Home much work would this be?

Using back up from .mac would this make restoring fairly easy?

 

[mad jew]

.Mac may help but before we get into the nitty gritty stuff, why do you want to do this? It might be better to keep the smaller drive available for your system and some files and then have the larger drive as a semi-backup plus large file database kinda thing.

 

[Cromulent]

Use the smaller faster drive (if it is indeed faster) as the boot drive and the larger drives for storage of files and media. Just use the boot drive for storing applications and the operating system.

 

[MacDale]

So I'm better off sticking to the original 250 HD that came with the computer. Ok, thanks.

 

[andy-ch]

Mine has 250 GB at Bay-1 (Original that came with MacPro)
And another 500 GB at Bay-2

I have plan formatting as RAID later

 

[mad jew]

So I'm better off sticking to the original 250 HD that came with the computer. Ok, thanks.

Yeah, you may as well. I can't see any real benefits in changing them out.

 

[hayduke]

Mine has 250 GB at Bay-1 (Original that came with MacPro)
And another 500 GB at Bay-2

I have plan formatting as RAID later

RAID0 is a bad idea unless you have a very robusted and thoroughly tested back-up plan. I don't think you can RAID1 different sized drives. Just a heads up.

Also, to the OP. I would use the 500GB as a back-up drive. This might be especially handy with Leopards upcoming Time Machine, which will might require significant hard drive space. Maybe someone else can comment on this.

 

[brooker]

RAID0 is a bad idea unless you have a very robusted and thoroughly tested back-up plan. I don't think you can RAID1 different sized drives. Just a heads up.

You can do raid 1 with different sized drives... but the resulting volume will only have hte capacity of the smallest drive. Similarly with raid 0, the resulting volume will have only twice the capacity of the smallest drive.

but it's worthy of a warning, nonetheless.

 

[Flynnstone]

I've done what you're wanting to do.
My Power Mac has/had a 150G. I bought a 300G.
(video eat HD space quickly!)

There's program called SuperDuper. It will make a bootable backup.
Works great. I need a program like this for my PC.

What about backups?
I have an external 300G firewire HD. I every so often SuperDuper to it.
If the main HD fails, I can boot off of the firewire. RUn to the store and get a replacement.