Mac Pro - adding a second 750GB Hard Drive - Best Configuration

I just purchased 2 Mac Pros. For the second one, I plan to use it as a server - thus I'll refer to it as "Mac Pro Server". On this Mac Pro Server, it came with the 250GB hard drive and I purchased a second 750GB hard drive. I plan to backup this total of 1TB to an external 1TB hard drive. I have two of these so I can take one home each week.
I've installed the second 750GB hard drive but I'm not sure the best way to set it up in Disk Utility. Should I keep it a second drive or should I combine it with the 250 to make it a full 1TB? I'll be connecting to the Mac Pro Server server from 3 other Macs in the office mostly moving Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign files.
What would you suggest?
Thank you!!
Zack

Hi,
Just for safety's sake I would leave the drives seperate, if you use RAID to stripe the drives together, and one subsequently fails you may loose everything.
With the 750GB used for the 'serving' aspects, and regularly backed up you should be safer.
Just make sure you have a safe, backed-up startable volume if downtime would be an issue in case of failure of the 750.
A

Similar Messages

  • My Mac Pro only has a 250GB hard drive. can I use my 1TB hard drive from my windows computer, they're bith SATA

    my Mac Pro only has a 250GB hard drive. can I use my 1TB hard drive from my windows computer, they're bith SATA

    You want system, data, backup etc. Make good use of the four internal drive bays.
    You will have to use Disk Utility to ERASE or click on drive and use PARTITION to make it Mac writeable.

  • I have a mac pro 1.1. the main hard drive failed. How do I reload OS X 10.7 back in my computer. the app store will not let me reinstall this os. My computer is not compatible OS x 10.8?

    I have a mac pro 1.1. the main hard drive failed. How do I reload OS X 10.7 back in my computer. the app store will not let me reinstall this os. My computer is not compatible OS x 10.8?

    You need to first install the OS your Mac came on the bundled gray disks. Assuming it's Snow Leopard, you could then login into the App Store using your same Apple ID and password to download and install Lion.
    If your Mac is a bit older and came with Leopard, 10.5.x, you can bypass that and install Snow Leopard from your retail disk. The only software you'd need to install separately from the gray disks would be the optional software, such as the iLife suite and other titles not included on the retail SL disk.

  • Mac Pro, Creative Suites and extra hard drive query

    I am seriously looking at purchasing a 15" Mac Pro this year - I know what specs I want, but I am curious as to what Mac users do re the extra hard drives? I am used to having a second hard drive on my PC for scratch discs for the Creative Suites including CS4. What do Mac users use for extra scratch discs? Do you use a removable drive? Apple tells me that I can't have any second hard drive in the Mac Pro or iMac, hence my query. (I will also be attaching my Wacom Cintiq 21UX to it as well.) Thank you.

    Thank you Steve - however I use the scratch disc in both Illustrator and Photoshop and Premiere, hence it becomes a more general question.
    In moving to a Mac I am trying to understand whether the drives work differently, or can you partition the main drive on a Mac and use those partitions for scratch discs?

  • Mac Pro 3,1 - did my hard drive die? And what should I replace it with?

    Hi,
    I inherited my late husband's 2008 Mac Pro (3,1 model) which had 2 x 500GB hard drives in it and 6GB of RAM. I filled the remaining hard drive bays with 1TB drives (I take a lot of video so needed the extra space). The boot drive was partitioned 50/50 in Boot Camp. I've upgraded the RAM to 10GB and I am currently running Lion.
    Today, while doing something as innocuous as scrolling down a web page, the bottom half of my screen went black and the top half began flashing wildly. When it  stopped after several seconds, the mouse would not respond and I could not click on anything. If flashed a bit more, and then I had mouse control back but could not click on anything - web links, applications, finder. After waiting patiently but getting nowhere, I powered the machine down manually, and when I re-started it, it failed to boot. The chime sounded, the apple appeared, and the little revolving wheel, but at the point where the screen would normally go blue then display the desktop, it just went white. The fans spin, but otherwise it's very silent.
    I tested with a second display, got the same issue. I tried booting to recovery mode but it went back to the white screen. I could start in target mode, and there were no issues with flickering screen, so I don't think it's the graphics card. Then I tried browsing to the hard drive over the network, but it wasn't showing on the PC network page, nor could I connect to it via the home theater system, which I can normally do as the streaming app launches on start-up. I am assuming this means the drive has failed? It's the original, and we bought the machine when they were new to the market, so is a good 5 years old. It contains not only the boot drive but my documents, photos, websites, selected videos, all of which are backed up on the Time Capsule, and I was in the process of uploading to cloud backup as well (although not very far along, due to data cap and slow international upload speeds). I had no warning it was about to do this, but then I guess sometimes you don't!
    Assuming I need to replace the drive, would it be worth replacing it with an OWC Mercury Electra 480GB SSD in an Icy Dock sled? Or would that be overkill for such an old machine? Would getting a standard 7200 WD Caviar HDD or similar give me enough of a speed boost? Obviously I am rather enamoured with the idea of a blazing fast SSD but I'd have to import it (not available locally) so I don't want to shell out all that money unless it's really going to make a massive difference.
    Is there anything else I would need to know about using an SSD over a HDD? I assume I would fire it up the normal way - install it, boot from my Snow Leopard install disc (I downloaded Lion from the App Store) format it, clean install SL, then re-update to Lion, then restore my Time Machine backup? Am I likely to experience any weird issues due to it being an SSD? I see talk online of firmware problems and something called TRIM that I don't know anything about. If it's most likely that I can install it and rock on as normal, then I'm pretty keen, but if there's a reasonable probability of it being temperamental, I probably wouldn't be willing to deal with that (and therefore go the HDD route instead). Therefore I am very keen to hear people's opinions and experiences.
    Sorry for the terribly long ramble. The more I have researched this, the more questions it raises! All advice gratefully accepted. Thanks!

    more than likely it is your video card. If it is ATI 2600XT, tell it bye-bye. The card is barely used at all in TDM or Safe Boot Mode. The 2600 and Lion and the issues with that card, even if it seems okay, is not.
    Depending on Windows OS as to how it mounts and sees your Lion HFSX (there is a nice HFSX driver from Paragon, and an NTFS driver for Lion too)
    480GB SSD is overkill for any system unless you are pushing CS6 2-3GB images and then for scratch. All you need for a boot drive is about 100GB.
    If you have an SSD now, then 1) you need to do a full image backup and restore (regularly as maintenance), and 2) TRIM Enabler
    Save Lion and you can always do a clean Lion install w/o going back to SL - but you might want to keep SL (dual boot) and handy if you run into anything you still need that required PowerPC/Rosetta
    FBDIMM RAM dies, Amazon has $32 kits of 4GB. And having all 8 DIMM slots filled improves things. If you need or want to and feel 16GB isn't overkill.
    SSD and issues are always possible. you should not just go along. not without a clone image. And you should have another drive w/ TRIM Enabler so that you can do a repair and "trim" what is needed.
    Clone a system with CCC regularly. Bootable. And can also be used by Setup Assistant.
    Install Lion over a heavily used SL system and there are likely remnants of old things that get in the way and left in there and not removed.

  • I can't get my Mac Pro to recognize my external hard drive

    I recently purcchased a Mac Pro. I have a 15" PowerBook G4 that I still use. About a year a go I purchased a Lacie 500 GB external hard drive and formated it on my PowerBook and transfered about 350 GB of data over a period of time. I know am trying to access the Lacie on Mac Pro and the disk will not mount. I know that you have to format external drives differenly for Intel Macs but is there a way for me to access my data on my Lacie?
    Please help! I need these files.
    Mac Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   Dual Core 3.0 Ghz, 4 GB memory

    Intel Macs use a different partition table format (GUID) for booting. Otherwise, the PPC/APL tables should still let it mount etc unless there is a problem with LaCie or the FireWire ports.
    Does it have FW800/400 and USB2?
    Seems like LaCie isn't using the best cases or firmware or bridge.
    This is a D2 model? two drives bridged to appear as one volume?

  • Mac Pro 2008 Not Recognizing SATA Hard Drives After Power Failure...

    So we recently had a weird power "outage" where the power still seemed to be surging some (my monitor was blinking wouldn't turn completely off until I yanked the plug on it), and to my dismay, when the power came back on, I started having boot issues with my Mac. Luckily I had a couple of identical dual-quad core machines sitting around (workgroup environment), swapped my hard drive into one of them, and was back in business on-the-fly.
    However, I'm now trying to troubleshoot the faulty machine (qihout throwing parts at it yet) and am stuck at an impasse. With the hard drive of the secondary machine cross-installed into the one that got "hit" by the outage, I simply got the chime and then it stuck on the dreaded gray screen, and out of all the boot options, the only one that would get me a different result was to try to option-boot into the Startup Manager, which would still give me the gray screen but also a mouse cursor after about a minute. Zapped PRAM... reset SMU... even swapped CMOS battery... all to no avail.
    So I started yanking things. Memory.. video card... and finally the one and only (swapped) hard drive. The last one did it, and I was finally able to option-boot, start up from the Installation CD, and ultimately, D-boot into the hardware tests on the CD. Ran both normal and extended tests and everything checked out fine, with no errors (and based on the potetnial error messgaes I read about, these tests check everything from the logic board to the power supply, and voltage across both).
    Now I'm torn and not sure which route to go from here. Machine seems to operate relatively normally when booting from CD... all hardware tests pass... Super Drive works (not sure it that's SATA or PATA, but guessing the latter at this point)... it just won't take a hard drive (which I verified is fine in another computer), regardless of which of the 4 bays I put it in. I'm also hard presed to believe that the power outage/surges caused the SATA cable(s) to go bad yet nothing else, which still have me leaning towards SATA controller on the board or a power supply issue despite the fact the tests passed.
    Thoughts, opinions, or comments... from experience or otherwise? Thanks in advance!

    Look hatter. I'm not saying it doesn't, but "prevention" is not why I started the thread. It was to troubleshoot the already existing problem, and you suggesting I run out and drop a combined $1000 on UPS units for each of the five 2008 Mac Pros I still have in my department is neither contributory to the thread topic nor cost-effective just to (possibly) prevent another (what seems to now be) $10 cable issue yet another 6 years down the road. Thanks, though. :/
    Well it wasn't the power supply, nor apparently the SATA controller (I don't believe at this point). I finally got the hard drive to recognize and boot again, but ended up having to use one of the two extra SATA connector ports on the board (which I can only assume are handled by the onboard SATA controller as well) and a 4-pin molex to SATA power adapter connected to the power output for the secondary optical drive. As such, It very well may just be the "Hard Drive Harness Cable", although I need to order a male to female SATA extension cable so I can hook the drive up directly to the data side of that the drive bay connectors to determine whether it's the data side or the power side causing issues. I'm again assuming power, since the extra SATA ports seem to work, I'm pretty sure the drive isn't spinning up fully, yet the bays obviously 'recognize' there's a drive in there (thus the gray screen when one is plugged in).
    Anyway - I'll update when I get to that point, primarily for posterity's sake, as I found several "unresolved" gray screen threads on the web (and even in these forums) that sounded just like mine yet offered little ultimate help. In the meantime, does anyone want to speculate on whether it's the cable itself or maybe the SATA chain power plug on the board could be bad? It looks to be pretty close to the main power input connector on the board, so just wondering if (worst case scenario) something could have popped on the board between the two? Seems unlikely, but...
    Either way, I can always work around it all if necessary by utilizing the same setup I got it to boot with.

  • Mac Pro 2007 No Power to Hard Drives

    While changing hard drives in my Mac Pro 2007 (model 2,1) today, I apparently shorted something out and there is no longer power being provided to any of the hard drives or the super drive. On first boot attempt, the fans went into over drive and I smelled something burning, so I quickly turned it off and reinstalled the original drive.
    I am able to boot up off a Yosemite installer USB flash drive and run Disk Utility - confirmed that none of the disks are visible. Everything else on the computer seems to be running fine. 
    Does this sound like a power supply issue or I have a fried something on the main logic board?
    Any help is greatly appreciated!
    Ryan

    Disk drive connector (AMP MATE-N-LOK 1-480424-0 Power Connector)
    AMP MATE-N-LOK 1-480424-0 Power connector (female pins)
    Type
    Electrical power connector
    Production history
    Manufacturer
    AMP
    Produced
    1963
    General specifications
    Width
    21 mm (female), 23 mm (male)
    Height
    6 mm (female), 8 mm (male)
    Pins
    4
    Electrical
    Signal
    Yes
    Max. voltage
    12 V
    Max. current
    11 A/pin (30 °C rise)
    Pin out
    Male Pins (Female Connector)
    Pin
    Color
    Type
    Pin 1
    Yellow
    +12 V
    Pin 2
    Black
    Ground
    Pin 3
    Black
    Ground
    Pin 4
    Red
    +5 V
    18 AWG wire is typically used.
    The desktop computer hard-drive connector is pictured here. It has 4 conductors, with the standard pinout as follows:
    Pin #
    Color
    Function
    1
    Yellow
    +12 V
    2
    Black
    Ground
    3
    Black
    Ground
    4
    Red
    +5 V
    SOURCE:
    images and text from wikipedia.org

  • Will G3 Mac pro recognize large firewire 400 hard drive

    I have an older G4 Mac Pro and I'm wondering if I can connect/use a larger hard drive via firewire 400. I understand there is a limitation on the size of drive attached internal, but does the same limit apply to firewire attached drives?

    Wow Kappy, thanks for the rapid reply & Yes, you are correct, my mistake, it is indeed a PowerPC.
    So I could attach a 2TB drive and use this machine as an iTunes server?

  • Adding a Second SATA Hard Drive

    Hi PPL,
    I have a K7N2 Delta - ILSR mobo and I want to add a second serial ATA hard drive to my board (identical to the drive already fitted) and I just wondered if there was anything I should beware of when setting up the array (using promise 376/378 driver) as I don't want to screw up and lose data on the original drive.
    Any ideas???
    Cheers,
    Jon.

    If you are going to be RAIDing them, you will have to reinstall Windows. You could back up any stuff you need onto another HD...Then set-up, make and format the array...After that you could move your stuff back over to the array from the back-up HD...I don't think there is a way to build an array and not reformat the drives, thus losing all data on them...
    As far as setting up the array, check your manual for the proper install methods...There are also some pretty useful guides floating around the forums here. Good Luck.

  • Installing operational system (MAC OS  X) on a new hard drive

    Hey Guys,
    My Mac Pro came with 250GB of hard drive so I bought a new hard drive, installed it (1TB) and it works just fine but; how can I transform this disk so It can become my main hard drive?
    - Do I have to install Mac os X on it? (how do I do that?)
    - Is this even possible?
    I just want to have more space on my hard drive when working on big projects (graphic design) cuz I only have like 30 GBs of space on my main one so the 1TB one works for me just as an external drive but inside of my Mac Pro.
    Can someone give me a hand on this?
    Thanks!

    I would buy more drives.
    Clone your current drive to the 1TB, yes.
    SuperDuper $29 is your bet shot.
    Keep the old drive as backup.
    Use #3 as new backup/clone or for TimeMachine.
    Migrate all your project files to drive #4, just change the application preferences to new location.
    Shame you waited so long. New drives will also give you a bit better disk performance.

  • I have two drives in my macbook pro. How can I download my apps to my second data hard drive instead of my OS SSD drive?

    I have two drives in my macbook pro. How can I download my apps to my second data hard drive instead of my OS SSD drive? Is there a way to point the default directory in the app store to a different hard drive? Certainly for a Mac Pro this makes sense.

    Hi,
    See if there is anything in this Link that applies:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4337
    Cheers,  

  • Whats the best way to transfer everything from my old macbook pro to a new mac mini, i have a external hard drive which i backup to regularly via time capsule

    whats the best way to transfer everything from my old macbook pro to a new mac mini, i have a external hard drive which i backup to regularly via time capsule

    Check out > OS X Lion: How to use Migration Assistant to transfer files from another Mac

  • I have backed my Mac Book pro up to my external hard drive using time machine. My iPhoto now does not show any images, even when I upload from my iPhone

    I have backed my Mac Book pro up to my external hard drive using time machine. My iPhoto now does not show any images, even when I upload from my iPhone

    Mac 101: File Sharing
    Mac OS X 10.7 Help: Transfer files between two Mac computers
    Mac OS X 10.7 Help: Set up a Windows computer to share files with Mac users
    Mac OS X 10.7 Help: Use iDisk to share files
    Mac OS X: Sharing your files with non-Apple computers
    How to share a Mac's files with a PC and vice versa.

  • I have an external hard drive set up as a Time Machine backup on my IMac. I want to add a second external hard drive and put my Aperture Photo Library on it. Is there a way to have the photos on this second hard drive automatically back up to the Time Mac

    I have an IMac with an external hard drive set up as  a Time Machine for automatic backups. I want to add a second external hard drive and load my Aperture Photo Library on to it so that the library can be shared by both me and my wife. Is there a way to automatically backup the photo library that will be on the second hard drive to the Time Machine hard drive?

    Open System Preference > Time Machine
    Click Options....
    Ckick on external disk in list and hit the - button below the list to remove from the Exclusion list
    Allan

Maybe you are looking for

  • User-Exit or Badi for dangerous goods - master data

    Is there any user-exit or BADI    we can use while changing or saving dangerous goods? We want to do a copy on other dangerous goods immediately after the change or creation of the dangerous goods master data. But I can't find an user-exit which can

  • Problems Viewing and Printing PDFs Created from FrameMaker

    I got no responses to this issue in the Acrobat forums (I posted 6 days ago), so since at least some of the PDFs were created through FrameMaker, I am posting here to see if anyone in this forum has seen the problem. At our company, we regularly crea

  • Using Alt+Drag to Copy A Layer

    When I'm make a copy of a layer by using the Alt key and left-click dragging, the copied layer is placed above the current layer. Is there a way to make this copied layer below the current layer (without having to manually move it below)? The same qu

  • Requirement in ALV

    Hi All, I have one requirement, In the ALV report output if user selects one record and press one push button, a pop up should come Ex: If user selects SO and press DELETE button, then a pop up screen should come with all the serial nubers related to

  • Sync shared calendar with Android

    Hello all, I'm hoping someone has found a solution for this: our office is almost exclusively Mac and iOS and we use shared calendars to communicate our work schedule (which changes often). A key person on the team has a Droid and we're trying to fig