Mac Pro Slower after adding second hard drive

My work computer is a Mac Pro 3,1 running Lion 10.7.3 with 4GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive. It was performing well running programs like Adobe CS5 and Final Cut Pro until I added a second 1TB drive (Western Digital WD1001FALS). After that upgrade Photoshop is way slower while programs like InDesign and Final Cut are noticable slower.
Is there any reason for this? Anything that can be done outside of a memory upgrade?

Let me try to direct you to some tips on CS5, and suggest that more hard drives properly used (OS, scratch, data, backup, array) can help, but that one drive and 4GB RAM is under performing.
Optimize Photoshop CS5
Optimizing Photoshop Overview
Adobe Photoshop FAQ
Optimize performance Photoshop
What are you using the WD1001FALS for? data? scratch?
And open Activity Monitor and check pageouts. Unless your use if very very light, I can't see that as being enough for even CS5 code and some OS X let alone any more apps.
Activity Monitor memory usage

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I have a MacBook Pro and an 1TB WD my passport for mac. I bought a second hard drive to act as back up and when I went to do this the original passport won't mount. It is showing in disc utility but it will not repair. I am told the mac cannot repair it.

I have a MacBook Pro and an 1TB WD my passport for mac. I bought a second hard drive to act as back up and when I went to do this the original passport won't mount. It is showing in disc utility but it will not repair. I am told the mac cannot repair it and I need to back up the files and then restore the hard drive. But I can't open the hard drive to move the files onto the new one!
Help me please. I am not very technical so please answer as if I have no clue!! This hard drive has my iPhoto on it and all my pictures of my son, wedding and my current photography course so I desperate to get it back!
Any help will he appreciated!

disk0s2: I/O error.
disk0s2: I/O error.
The MBP's disk is damaged and requires replacement.
Genius Bar Reservations: http://www.apple.com/retail/geniusbar/

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?

Is it possible to model mac-mini M815 install a second hard drive?

Hi all!
Tell me whether, you can install a second hard drive, such as SSD or plain and you need to do?
My model mac-mini M815 with 500GB hard drive.

Standard Hard Drive:
500 GB (5400 RPM)
Int. HD Interface:
Serial ATA (6 Gb/s) x2
Details:
This model also can be equipped with a 750 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive for an additional US$150. A second hard drive or SSD also can be installed, although it is not formally supported. Also see: How do you upgrade the hard drive(s) in the Aluminum "Unibody" Mac mini models? What type of hard drive(s) do they support?
From Everymac.com.
For the Mac Mini MC815LL of 2011.
If this is not your model have a look here to find it and confirm what can be done.

[Solved] Strange free space after adding 2nd hard drive

Hello,
Im pretty new to linux but am learning pretty fast, fast enough that I needed to install a second hard drive.
Every thing went well, got the new drive in and mounted to /home and moved all my old /home to the new drive. After all that I went to delete the old /home on hda resize the / partition to use the rest of the drive.
I used gParted 0.5.0 and booted from their live CD and did the deed. BUT now drive hda (40GB drive) shows that / is taking 36.92GB, when it was originally using about 4GB on the original 7GB / partition.
I ran the disk usage tool and..well
1) It shoes that I'm using 4GB of 40GB
2) Only shows that I have 44GB available when I have 2 40GB Drives installed.
can someone tell me whats going on here?
to recap
Originally the 1 drive was laid out as
/boot - 100MB
swap - 260MB
/ - ~7GB
/home - remainder of drive
then I (wanted to) changed it to
[sda]
/boot - 100MB
SWAP - 260MB
/ - Remainder of drive
[sdb]
/home - 40GB
Thank you for any help.
I have attached the screen shots
Last edited by =OTS=G-Man (2009-12-10 06:02:03)

ill try the fsck right now
heres the output you requested
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 7.3G 3.9G 3.0G 57% /
none 505M 120K 505M 1% /dev
none 505M 0 505M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 99M 12M 83M 12% /boot
/dev/sdb1 38G 93M 38G 1% /home
total 46G 4.0G 42G 9%
thats interesting.
/dev/sda3 is showing its old values almost like something in the partition tables didn't get updated?
Last edited by =OTS=G-Man (2009-12-09 06:19:55)

Mac Mini server not showing second hard drive

early 2009 mini server suddenly won't show the second hard drive for time machine. All I get in the system profiler is this?
Is my hard drive toast or is there any idea out there of how to recover it?
Thanks for the help! Running 10.6.8 server by the way.

Maybe the connector to the HD come loose. That happend abount a month ago on my 2009 Mini

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 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.

Old MacBook Pro slow and hangs frequently, hard drive problems?

Hi,
I have an old Macbook Pro (one of the originals, from about 4 1/2 years ago). Recently I've been noticing that it runs really slow, especially when its been running for a while and there are multiple programs open. It will take a long time to switch between windows, opening a tab in Safari will usually cause a spinning beach ball for 10-15 seconds and Safari crashes frequently. Other programs have similar problems, but don't normally crash. It's running Snow Leopard and has 1GB of RAM. Obviously I expect it to be slower with lots of stuff open, but my usage patterns haven't changed and its performance certainly has. The harddrive always seems to be being accessed when I have these problems.
The hard drive S.M.A.R.T. status is "verified," and I ran the Apple Hardware Test and it came out fine. But I'm still really worried that something could be going wrong, especially with the hard drive and since I am going away in a few weeks to work on a project and will be away from my backup drive I really want to make sure any problem is taken care of beforehand.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be the the problem or about anything I should try?
Much Thanks.

With lots of concurrent processes and insufficient memory you will experience slow performance and beachballing. This is because the OS is forced to use the hard drive to replace the non-existent physical RAM. See the following:
About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Memory Management in Mac OS X
Performance Guidelines- Memory Management in Mac OS X
A detailed look at memory usage in OS X
Understanding top output in the Terminal
The amount of available RAM for applications is the sum of Free RAM and Inactive RAM. This will change as applications are opened and closed or change from active to inactive status. The Swap figure represents an estimate of the total amount of swap space required for VM if used, but does not necessarily indicate the actual size of the existing swap file. If you are really in need of more RAM that would be indicated by how frequently the system uses VM. If you open the Terminal and run the top command at the prompt you will find information reported on Pageins () and Pageouts (). Pageouts () is the important figure. If the value in the parentheses is 0 (zero) then OS X is not making instantaneous use of VM which means you have adequate physical RAM for the system with the applications you have loaded. If the figure in parentheses is running positive and your hard drive is constantly being used (thrashing) then you need more physical RAM.
Also, a small hard drive with too little free space and a system lacking in any regular maintenance can also lead to slow performance. See the following:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard. These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard and should not be installed.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc. Other utilities are also available such as Onyx, Leopard Cache Cleaner, CockTail, and Xupport, for example.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
Backuplist
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
iBackup
JaBack
Silver Keeper
MimMac
Retrospect
Super Flexible File Synchronizer
ynchronizer
SuperDuper!
Synchronize Pro! X
SyncTwoFolders
Synk Pro
Synk Standard
Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.
This should give you a few things to start sorting things out and getting better performance from your computer within its limitations.
If you have a Core Duo model then 2 GBs is the maximum RAM you can install. If you have a Core 2 Duo model then you can install up to 4 GBs but they system will only make use of 3 GBs. As for the hard drive it can be replaced. Notebook drives in the 250 to 500 GB - 7200 RPM range are relatively inexpensive. Visit OWC for pricing on drives and RAM. Visit Data Mem for pricing on RAM.

2008 macbook pro beeps after installing new hard drive

I install a new hard drive in a 2008 macbook pro and it just beeps. three quick beeps repeatedly. I cloned the new drive from my 2011 macbook pro
Is anybody experience this same problem? please help
thank you

You can't reliably use the clone from one Mac on another Mac of a different vintage. Boot off an external hard drive after installing the operating system from Apple or the original discs on the external hard drive, and use the migration assistent to import data from the internal hard drive. You'll want to make sure the copy on the external hard drive does not excede the internal hard drive capacity by more than 85% before cloning and overwriting its contents.

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?

Macbook pro slow with 1tb external hard drive not fully utilized

I have a 13" macbook pro (late 2011 model) 8GB ram (1333mhz) and 500gb sata drive. I use photoshop CS6 and Lightroom quite frequently and all my images are stored on a 1tb external seagate drive. The drive is 70% full but the macbook is not able to open folders. The drive does show up in the finder but seems blank though all the files are on it. I do not keep much on my internal hard drive so the computer is not inundated with data in anyway. Please let me know how I can fix this

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
{ diskutil list; echo; diskutil cs list; } | open -ef
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. If the command produced no output, the window will be empty. Post the contents of the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window), if any — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

Power mac g4 MDD put a second hard drive in it and wont boot up with it in

hi i have a second 150g hard drive i just put in my powermac and it will not boot up with it im kinda new to this which is why i bought an a MDD to **** with but i probably shouldnt have done this but i booted the computer up with out the new hard drive plugged in and then plugged it in and its just sitting their with the color wheel going i picked the harddrive up off ebay and it says it will work on a mac is their something im missing here

HI there, likely it's just the Jumper settings on the New HD, set it to Cable Select or Slave if it's in the middle of the cable & the Other one has Jumpers set to Master.

Mac Pro Slower after adding second hard drive

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