Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: mdijb on November 03, 2009, 12:55:08 pm

Title: Where to place the boot volume and how
Post by: mdijb on November 03, 2009, 12:55:08 pm

I am getting new Macpro and have read how to use a boot disc separate from the data disc.  I have a 10,000rpm drive in addition to the drive supplied with the machine.  WOuld it be OK to place the startup or boot volume on a partition on this 10,00 rpm drive, and create another partition for use as the scratch drive.  All the data and photos would be on a separate drive.

How can I do this?  If  this is done, what am I seeing when I look at my Desktop and what drive woul it be located?

Thanks for any help.

MDIJB

Title: Where to place the boot volume and how
Post by: Gemmtech on November 03, 2009, 01:40:05 pm

The best way to build any computer is to use one VERY FAST hard drive (C Drive) (I use all 15K SCSI) and install the OS and programs, ghost it and then keep all your data on a separate HD (D Drive).  I've been building all my own computers for 11 years and build every one that way, I do it just in case a drive fails, but I've never had a SCSI drive fail, just the IDE units.

Title: Where to place the boot volume and how
Post by: fike on November 03, 2009, 01:49:41 pm

When you separate the boot disk, PS scratch disk, and virtual memory disk, it isn't really sufficient to put them on different partitions of the same drive.  To get the most benefit, you need to be able to access these drives simultaneously.  This means that they need to be completely separate disks (actual hard drives) on separate SATA channels (on older systems that used PATA, you also needed to put them on separate cables).  

So, your proposed layout will have minimum, or no, added benefit.

Title: Where to place the boot volume and how
Post by: jjlphoto on November 03, 2009, 02:21:13 pm

Here's one thought:
Leave your boot drive as the one that came with the machine. It will be in drive bay #1.
If you want screaming performance, set up drive bays 2, 3 and 4 as your Scratch/RAID system. Get three 1TB drives configured via softRAIDto a RAID 5. You can just set PS scratch prefs to the entire RAID volume OR partition the outer portion of the drives into 30GB scratch volumes first, then RAID 5 the rest of the volumes.

Sort of a variation of what Jack Flescher describes here:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=36642 (http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=36642)

Title: Where to place the boot volume and how
Post by: Ken Bennett on November 03, 2009, 06:20:01 pm

You might find some useful information here:

http://macperformanceguide.com/ (http://macperformanceguide.com/)