My Mac Pro has a bunch of hard drives right now, and I have been adding, swapping, and removing drives the last few months. It was time for me to get a bit more organized and I think that’s a great tip for everybody. It gives you a much better understanding of what is on your computer system.
You might think “What is so hard about finding stuff on your hard drive”, well .. let me give you a simple example: Your browser might store downloaded files on your Desktop, while you have an OS ‘Downloads/’ folder, or perhaps your torrent client stores it in ‘programs/client/downloads/’, making it a bit annoying having to browse around while a single link on your desktop to your ‘Downloads/’ folder might make it a lot easier for you.
First things first of course, what goes where?
My first drive in the Mac Pro is currently a 250GB drive (called MacHD) which is used to store the OSX 10.5 operating system and the programs I use. Most of the data that result from those programs are stored on the second drive which I called the DataHD, it’s 320GB. This drive has a folder called backup_machd where I store backups of certain files from the MacHD drive. The MacHD drive by the way has a folder called backup_datahd where I store daily backups of the DataHD folders. Since there’s enough space no the DataHD I also have a htdocs/ folder in the root where I have my localhost ‘dev’ stuff, such as a test instance of vBulletin, or the svn build from DeskPro, stuff like that. The MacHD (almost forgot to mention) has a folder called bash where I have my custom coded bash scripts that help me run daily or weekly crontabs to make archived backups of certain folders (among other things).
These two drives, the MacHD and the DataHD drives are being backed up with the ‘Time Machine’ feature from Leopard. I have an external USB 2.0 box with 2x 160GB hard drives. Not perfect, but when I have a bit of extra cash in 2008 I will upgrade these a larger size so I can have bigger backups that go back further in time. These are the only back ups I make of my internal drives. I do not really back up my media drives.
I have 2 more USB 2.0 external drives, but they’re used to back up data for a few web sites. I don’t use them, and the back ups are done automatically. I just check once a month if things are still going ok. But it’s kept separate from my ‘live’ system.
I also have 2 media drives. One is called MediaHD (320GB) which stores my music, movies, games, and downloads. I point all my programs to that download things from the net to this downloads folder, which has sub folders to keep it organized and easy to find. The other drive is called TvHD where I store my purchased TV shows. I really like good tv shows and I watch a lot. It’s a 750GB drive. The drive is split in 2 partitions though. A very small portion is used by Adobe and ProTools as a ‘cache drive’ to help speed up running filters and renders on huge media files. Since there’s over a terabyte of data on the media drives I do not back them up. It’s a risk I am willing to take. I don’t want to hog my system backup moment because it’s trying to backup and compress huge files that I can re-download from iTunes or Amazon.
The Mac OSX comes with default folders for Music, Pictures, Documents, Downloads, etc, but I really don’t use them. They’re useless to me as they are on the Main HDD and I store everything on other drives. It’s a bit of a hassle to change the original symlinks and I just dragged them out of Finder, and dragged my own entry point folders into the sidebar. I also made my own small stack folder which are quick links to all these folders. Making it very easy and quick to use.
My plan for the future is to add a 1TB drive into the system, replacing the 320GB MediaHD one. And use the 320GB MediaHD as an Ethernet network drive. I have 1 port on my router unused, and it would be nice if all systems in the apartment or visitors coming over, can use this network drive. Eventually I also want to replace the MacHD that’s 250GB with a bigger one. And move the 250GB as a dedicated MusicHD on the FireWire800 port. And if I ignore the lack of money in my wallet, I could imagine having the MyBook of 1 or 2TB as external backup drive on the other firewire800 port, for backing up the MacHD and the DataHD with TimeMachine.
For now I have enough space obviously, and there’s no problem making new space either. There’s enough data like old music, or a few movies or tv shows that I won’t ‘watch’ again. Or I could throw away backups older then 6 months.
But back to the topic. On my old PC I just had it where the OS threw it, or that particular program. And it was quite annoying to find it back, or to take the time and organize it. Or just accept that the Desktop is filled with icons. On my Mac now I have things a lot more organized in a way that it is, for me personally, easy to find. Media goes to the media drives, data goes to the data drive. And software goes to the Mac drive.
Now, if anything breaks, I loose either all my Data (which I have a backup of) or my programs (and I will still have all my data after a re-install) or I loose my media (and then I cry a little, but at least I still have all my data). Hard drives are a lot cheaper these days, getting a 500gb for around 100 bucks is kind of easy to find. The Mac Pro can have up to four drives in it. And it takes the 7200.11 Sata2 drives from Seagate which are 1TB. So that’s 4 TB of data! Then there are of course the options to expand over USB ports, Firewire ports, and eventually over the Network on Ethernet or even add Wifi drives.
Who needs DVD burners right?
Here are some pictures of me adding the new 320GB and 750GB to the system (which I done earlier this year)
