Which HD for system - PowerMac

[yojitani]

With only about 5GB left, and countless data DVD's, on the original PM 160GB HD, I'm going to get a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 300GB for the second drive bay. The question I'm asking now is which one should I use for my main OS? The Maxtor drive has a 16MB cache and I have heard numerous reports of its speed, especially in post 10.4.1 OSX. Does the speed justify a slightly more laborious changeover? Is it really that fast? I had planned to use the 300GB as a scratch/backup disk.. Your 2 cents?

 

[MacNoobie]

With only about 5GB left, and countless data DVD's, on the original PM 160GB HD, I'm going to get a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 300GB for the second drive bay. The question I'm asking now is which one should I use for my main OS? The Maxtor drive has a 16MB cache and I have heard numerous reports of its speed, especially in post 10.4.1 OSX. Does the speed justify a slightly more laborious changeover? Is it really that fast? I had planned to use the 300GB as a scratch/backup disk.. Your 2 cents?

I'm in the same boat basically wanting to upgrade the 160GB Maxtor that came with my G5 before I get into HD. Usually you'd put your OS and apps on your 300GB and use a fast drive (10,000 rpm) as a scratch disk to work on in FCP. If both are 7200 drives but one has more cache then I'd probably use the 16mb cache for a scratch disk and the one with 8mb for OS and apps. Depending on how serious you are you might look at a Western Digital 10,000 rpm SATA drive 16mb cache for scratch and maybe a 300GB (the bigger the better) for storage though I feel like 300GB might not even be enough depending on how you’re going to store the raw footage and how often you’ll shoot and how long you’d want to store the footage for.

Hope this helps.

 

[arogge]

I would install the main OS on the faster drive. The Seagate drive that Apple installed on the PowerMac has a 2 MB cache. It is noticeably slower than a drive with an 8 MB cache. Are you running YDL?

 

[yojitani]

Depending on how serious you are you might look at a Western Digital 10,000 rpm SATA drive 16mb cache for scratch and maybe a 300GB (the bigger the better) for storage though I feel like 300GB might not even be enough depending on how you’re going to store the raw footage and how often you’ll shoot and how long you’d want to store the footage for.

thanks for the help. The Western Digital Drives do look tempting, but right now I'm on a tight budget and need disk space. I'm not doing too much right now, so 300 GB should be fine for at least another 6 months.

I would install the main OS on the faster drive. The Seagate drive that Apple installed on the PowerMac has a 2 MB cache. It is noticeably slower than a drive with an 8 MB cache. Are you running YDL?

Does the seagate really have such a small cache? This machine is a 1.8 dual from last fall and from as much as I can tell by searching the model number, it has an 8MB cache. I haven't found a way to verify that though. Is there some way of finding out?

Oh, I'm not running YDL if you mean yellow dog. Why do you ask?

YOJ

 

[arogge]

The drive that came with my PowerMac G4 has a 2 MB cache, but yours may be a new model with the 8 MB cache.
If you have a main OS, what is the secondary OS? YDL is the common choice for dual-boot configurations.

 

[Mechcozmo]

The drive that came with my PowerMac G4 has a 2 MB cache, but yours may be a new model with the 8 MB cache.
If you have a main OS, what is the secondary OS? YDL is the common choice for dual-boot configurations.

He... doesn't need... a second... OS....


Don't bother changing OS X system disks around. Won't make that big of a performance difference. But I would recommend looking at ffmpegX to make your DVDs into H.264 videos. (AKA, smaller)Linkety