Best config for adding new 250GB HD

Question

Greetings:
My G4 at work shipped with a 40GB drive that filled up quickly with design projects, etc. I'm on the brink of a huge catalog project, and I was down to less than 3GB of space, so I dumped all the archived stuff to an external and now have 25GB of free space to work with.
Hoping to prevent any storage/performance problems in the future, we bought a 250GB Maxtor (internal) and the Sonnet ATA/133 PCI card. At first I was thinking of partitioning the new drive to form scratch, boot and storage sections. After reading some threads here it seems partitioning would cause more problems than solve them.
So what then, would be the best configuration for the two drives to work together? I am doing some pretty heavy design work with Adobe CS and will be installing Tiger. Any ideas for the best setup for speedy and efficient operation? It'll be the first time I've added an additional HD to the rig.
Your help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
PowerPC Quicksilver G4 800MHz 1.25 GB SDRAM   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Hi, Time Pilot!
I really can't tell you the "best" way to set up your drives, but I will say that I personally run partitioned drives when it suits my needs. I still use PS 7.01 and use a scratch disk on a partitioned volume, which I also use for video import and editing. I also have a volume set aside on my second internal drive for backups/archives, in addition to the clones I keep externally.
I wouldn't recommend partitioning without good reason, but I wouldn't condemn it, as some may. I've successfully done it for years. Perhaps the biggest mistake folks make when partitioning is to create too many partitions, or partitions which are too small to be useful down the line. If I could give a general guideline, I'd say that fewer partitions is better, resulting in more space per partition while minimizing wasted space. Do what makes sense for you, rather than be hamstrung during daily operations. Alternately, add yet another drive.
Regarding the card and new drive... your original drive should already be jumpered as Master, but you might check to insure it's not set for Cable Select. Put the new drive on the Sonnet card, jumpered as Master and connected to the end connector on the ribbon cable. You can leave your old drive on the logic board's bus if it's the original drive that came with the Mac. Unless it's an ATA-100 or -133 drive, you won't get any better performance from it if you install it on the second controller on the Sonnet PCI card. After installing the PCI card and drive, do a PRAM reset when you boot the first time. Then launch Disk Utility and format (initialize) the drive, using the Erase option. Format the drive with Mac OS Extended and check the box to install the OS 9 drivers, whether you plan to run OS 9 or not. It takes up no user-accessible space on the drive and you might be glad the drivers are there if you ever have to do a firmware update which OS X might not be able to handle, or something similar. You might also take the opportunity to overwrite zeros to the new drive before putting into service. This takes a few hours and is not essential, but is good insurance. The zero-overwrite process will identify and map out any bad sectors which may be on the drive, precluding their future use and insuring against consequent data corruption. If you plan on partitioning, switch to the Partition tab when you're done.
If you want to move your current startup volume to the new drive, use a cloning utility to do so. You can use the Restore option in Disk Utility, but most folks seem to prefer a third-party alternative like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper!. The former is donationware and the latter is freeware for full volume cloning. Both are very simple and effective.
If you have questions, please feel free to post them and one of the Members will be glad to help.
Gary
1GHz DP G4 Quicksilver 2002, 400MHz B&W rev.2 G3, Mac SE30   Mac OS X (10.4.5)   5G iPod, Epson 2200 & R300 & LW Select 360 Printers, Epson 3200 Scanner