Right now on my mac pro I have my OS and apps on one drive and use a separate drive as a "scratch drive" for editing purposes and those kinds of things. My question is two fold. (a) Is it possible with OSX to put my OS on one drive, my apps on a second drive, and use a third drive as my scratch drive? (b) If I can will it even do my any good?
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Yet another hard drive question
- Thread starter rdsii64
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OS and apps are best on a single drive but I wouldn't use a mechanical disk it just has to be an SSD. Moving your apps folder especially if the apps you run that use installers (Office, Adobe CS to name just two) can screw them up badly I've found. Scratch can be a mechanical drive but heavy photoshoppers running Mac Pro's I know use an SSD for that too and use spinning disks purely for media. Even more power hungry users use the SSD's for OS and scratch on raid arrays!
a) Yes, you could use symlinks to make this work. Have a look at this thread here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/884917/
b) That depends. What exactly do you understand under "will it even do my any good"?
- You gain some HD space on you boot drive. Not a big gain, if you ask me. (Unless you store FCP with all samples and Logic Studio with all samples on your boot disk.)
- Speedwise, once an application is loaded, it should reside mostly in memory. Same is true for the OS. So splitting applications and OS on two disks will most likely not have much benefit (at least for usual Mac OS X applications).
c) I would not do all the hassle with splitting applications between several drives. The problem is, that you will notice the problems only after you did change your applications location. While most are likely to work just fine, there might be some which behave badly once they have been moved. Bad code and there is nothing you can do about it.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/884917/
b) That depends. What exactly do you understand under "will it even do my any good"?
- You gain some HD space on you boot drive. Not a big gain, if you ask me. (Unless you store FCP with all samples and Logic Studio with all samples on your boot disk.)
- Speedwise, once an application is loaded, it should reside mostly in memory. Same is true for the OS. So splitting applications and OS on two disks will most likely not have much benefit (at least for usual Mac OS X applications).
c) I would not do all the hassle with splitting applications between several drives. The problem is, that you will notice the problems only after you did change your applications location. While most are likely to work just fine, there might be some which behave badly once they have been moved. Bad code and there is nothing you can do about it.
If OS and apps are best kept on a single drive thats what I will do. So this means OS/apps on and SSD. An SSD for a scratch. A large capacity mechanical drive for my Itunes library, and the last one as a time machine back up of my OS drive. Then I can use any combination of large capacity external mechanical drives for media back up and long term storage of stuff I don't need on my computer at any given time. This will turn out ok after all (chuckle)
thanks for input.
No problem - the onboard ports only support SATA 2 but will work fine with the SSD's. When you want to go SATA 3 get a PCIe SATA 3 card and see the transfer rates almost double again
