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What are you doing with drives 2, 3 & 4?

M

Michael73

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 27, 2007
1,082
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My guess is that most of you have all four drive bays filled. For those planning on upgrading to the new MacPro, what are you doing with your current SATA drives?

In my case drive 1 is programs and docs, drives 2 & 3 are media while drive 4 is used as a Time Machine. I'm thinking about getting a 2 or 3 drive enclosure and hanging my two media drives on the network via a port on my Time Capsule. My Time Machine drive I'll probably physically connect to one of the TB ports. Anyone know if they make any TB2 drive enclosures I can throw a SATA drive in?
 
Bay 1 & 2: 2 X320G HDDS in Raid0.
Bay 3 & 4: 2 X 1TB HDDS in Raid1.

EDIT:

Getting a 256G SSD (hopefully) today. I'll put that in my 2010 Macbook and take the current 128G SSD and add it to the opti-bay of the MacPro. So, I'll have Bay 1 & 2 free. Unless I keep the 2X320s in it for extra storage until I get a few more 1TB+ drives.
 
Drives 2 and 3 are backup files. Drive 4 is the clone of my boot drive, Drive 1
 
Bay 1 is the OS HDD. I should really upgrade to an SSD.

Bays 2-4 are a RAID-0 config to capture uncompressed HD off a PCIe Blackmagic card.

All of this could be moved to Thunderbolt, but would be less elegant. However, given dual FirePro GPUs as standard, my next Mac will probably be a Mini, as that power is overkill for me.
 
Bay1: Intel 520 SSD OSX
Bay2: Intel 520 SSD Bootcamp
Bay3: WD Black, media, music and PhD backups (electron microscopy images)
Bay4: WD 320GB (original with Mac Pro), nothing, just chillin out, might set up a raid 1 or something with bay 3 later in the year with another 1TB dive
 
Michael73 said:
My guess is that most of you have all four drive bays filled. For those planning on upgrading to the new MacPro, what are you doing with your current SATA drives?

In my case drive 1 is programs and docs, drives 2 & 3 are media while drive 4 is used as a Time Machine. I'm thinking about getting a 2 or 3 drive enclosure and hanging my two media drives on the network via a port on my Time Capsule. My Time Machine drive I'll probably physically connect to one of the TB ports. Anyone know if they make any TB2 drive enclosures I can throw a SATA drive in?
Click to expand...

I do have all 4.
3x512 ssd and a 2 tb dump drive.
Mac
bootcamp / Cache partitioned for After effects etc.
Work
dump

Time machine on a synology.

With the new MPC I'll probably get 2 of the Crucial M500 960GB or whatever is around then - in a thunderbolt enclosure in the garage... IF i can find these elusive 20m Optical Thunderbolt cables

BUT

most places I freelance for ( channel 5 in the UK for example ) Have stock spec machines with 1 drive and 8 or 16gb or ram - mostly doing After effects or rendering - not realising they are only using ( can use ) 1-4 of 12 cores.

So the new MPC is going be great for places like that. Simple setup - thunderbolt storage network. Zero slow down. Less hassle and shared resources.
 
6 2TB Samsung Ecos (bays 1-4, other two mounted in optical drive bay) for media (Plex, ZFS file system). Samsung ssd for boot and apps, Intel ssd for scratch, both mounted in odd by way of OWC drive mounts.
 
OS on a PCI-based SSD.
4 hard drive bays plus one of the CDROM bay converted to 3.5inch bay:
2TB*5 in RAID0, to store astronomical data.
 
I guess most of you missed my question which I probably wasn't very clear about...

Since the new MacPro is going to utilize PCIe SSD and lacks other memory expansion bays, what are you going to do with your existing SATA drives (or the data on them)? Physically connect them via TB, put them on a network or something else?

I'm making the assumption we'll only have 1TB - 2TB internal storage tops.
 
Good question and some viable answers.

Until we all know what the internal SSDBlade storage (PCIe) is going to be - standard or maximum - I'm not anyone will know what their configuration will be.

How many optional internal drives can be slotted into the new MP R2D2, if any?
What drive enclosures are feasible for ThunderBolt?
- LaCie has a few options of empty bays,
- DRobo has their mini which can hold 4x2.5" SSD/HDD using SATAIII.
Will AirPort Extreme AC be considered if using the Gigabit ethernet ports to an external bay; say using RAID0/1?

These are some of the things I'm curious about - I don't own any Mac Pro, never have but I'm salivating on the R2D2. Do I need it? Of course not, but I so badly want to treat myself for so many years of punishment in so many ways.
 
My 1st gen MP died a few months ago so I'm still trying to figure out something...

Bay 1: SSD
Bay 2+3: 2 X 1 TB Raid1
Bay 4: 2 TB Time Machine

Unfortunately I think all the drives fried when the MP died, I've stuck 2 in a usb enclosure but my Air won't read them (my Air is on Mountain Lion I'm not sure if that matters since the MP was on Lion.) I do have backups of important files but I haven't had time to work on it (life issues past 6 months.)

I'm thinking whatever the Apple store sells as an external enclosure (whether Apple branded or 3-rd party) is what I'll get.
 
Bay 1: SSD for Fusion Drive (OS/Apps + Docs, Pictures)
Bay 2: HDD for Fusion Drive (OS/Apps + Docs, Pictures)
Bay 3: HDD for Virtual Machines and RAW backups
Bay 4: SSD for Boot Camp
Bay 5 (optical bay): HDD which is a direct clone of my Fusion Drive
 
Michael73 said:
I guess most of you missed my question which I probably wasn't very clear about...

Since the new MacPro is going to utilize PCIe SSD and lacks other memory expansion bays, what are you going to do with your existing SATA drives (or the data on them)? Physically connect them via TB, put them on a network or something else?

I'm making the assumption we'll only have 1TB - 2TB internal storage tops.
Click to expand...
Depending on the age of the drives, it might be good to retire them. Depending on what's on the drives (and this will be different for everybody) the options are either a simple USB 3.0 enclosure or a simple multidrive USB3.0 enclosure. Or you could go thunderbolt, but that would be more expensive and may not be worth it for older drives. I'm thinking USB 3.0 enclosures plus one of the dock solutions to add more USB 3.0 ports might be the way to go, especially as some of the docks have a FireWire port and one includes an optical drive and room for a ssd or hd inside.
 
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