schrunk

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Aug 27, 2006
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So looks like I am swiming in a sea of PC users here. But hopefully this dosent have to do with OSX.

I have a new Mac Pro with the quad 2.66 Xeons. It has a stock 250gig 7200RPM drive via serial ATA.
I just reciently bought a 76 gig raptor 16meg cache to add to my system. Now this is my question.

What is the most effecient setup for a 250 gig drive and a 76 gig high speed hard drive? Should I use the 76gig as a scratch disk? (I would sum up my work as a creative professional, aka photoshop, final cut pro, etc...) Or should I use it as a boot disk with my OS and applications and use the 250 gig drive as a storage drive?

I have tried both configs and when the raptor is the boot drive it seems to boot up slower?!? then my 7200 rpm drive. My friend said it is because 10K drives spin up slower but then are faster once started.


Could someone please shine a light on the "correct" way to go about this :)

-Nick
 
The raptor shouldnt boot any slower then your 250gb drive, but faster. If not you may have a problem.

For the work you do, you should have the rapter as your OS drive / program drive. The 250gb for data. And spend $40 bucks on a 3rd sata drive for scratch data if you need the extra perfomance. A third drive with only the stratch helps alot when doing vid edditng via final cut, premier, ... I dont know if macs also have Virtual Memory but that should be sent to the 3rd drive as well. In most cases, the smaller the drive the beter performance, but the new Perpindicular recording method is helping out with that.

Defrag often as this helps keep everything running fast (hard drive wise). And thats about it.
 

schrunk

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Spend 40 bucks on another SATA drive.
what would your recomendation be then?


Is the fact that the Raptor is 1.5 SATA and the 7200 drive is 3.0 SATA make a difference? (because they couldnt read/write faster then 1.5 would they?)
 
Perfomance wise, unless your 3.0 sata drive is also a perpindicular recorder (it will say), then the rapter will still be faster. if it is, then they will be almost equal in performance. I would recomend a 100gb (the lowest you will find a drive i bet) maxtor 3.0 sata drive. Should be around 40$. Just use it as your temporary drive scratch drive, and what ever else mac uses for disk memory.
 

IcY18

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Spend 40 bucks on another SATA drive.
what would your recomendation be then?


Is the fact that the Raptor is 1.5 SATA and the 7200 drive is 3.0 SATA make a difference? (because they couldnt read/write faster then 1.5 would they?)

1.5 SATA and 3.0 SATA or (SATA I and SATA II) does not translate into any performance increase, it is merely the the transfer speed of which no hd out right now can fully use even an ATA-133, so it depends all on the read/write performance and most likely the raptor will be the faster of the two, so set it up with your OS and apps and the 250 for all other storage/information