Question about Hard disk

My current computer's setup (for Hard disk) is as follows:
IDE0: A 80Gb HD with the root partition (including /temp and so), another partition for swap and another one for /boot
SATA0: A 2Tb HD for /home
I use my computer for watching HD movies via HDMI and for surfing the internet mainly... the machine is rather new (i recently upgraded the video card and the ram memory), but i notice some slowlyness sometimes (while hearding heavy hard disk activity) and i think, this might be because of that IDE HD i still have, the one i use for the system itself.
My question is:
Given the fact that a 250 Gb SATA2 HD is around 30€, is it worth it to purchase one and replace the IDE one i currently use for the system partitions?
Would that considerably increase the performance of the whole machine?
Even the movies are in the SATA HD (way faster than the IDE one) the swap and the temp folder are still in the IDE disk...
What do you guys think?
Last edited by Xi0N (2010-10-26 09:51:06)

Even if your stuff is in the SATA drive, it will work in IDE compatibility mode instead of AHCI. (this is an option in the BIOS)
AHCI is especially useful for laptop because of power management features, the performance will be a tad better overall but not by much. http://expertester.wordpress.com/2008/0 … advantage/. It also depends of your disk's RPM (Anyway if you want mindblowing performance, buy an SSD and put your root partition on it)
The slowness sometimes may be because of, not enough RAM leading to swapping, a cron job (man-db for example) or because of too much /tmp or ~/.cache or ~/.thumbnails activity. It may be worthwhile to mount those directories in tmpfs to limit disk activities.

Similar Messages

Confused about hard disk space

ok, I am new to Apple and not a computer person per say, so I am very confused when all of a sudden my new computer is now telling me I do not have enough space on my hard disk to download things. I have downloaded pictures and videos but have never had this problem with my old pc and I have more disk space on my apple. am I doing something wrong?
and, I tried to move some of my photos that I downloaded onto a disk to free up some space but it's not letting me move the originals. I'm getting super frustrated -- HELP!

Agreed, jtandi, we would be happy to help.
Have you checked your system profile to see how much hard disk space you have available? If not, follow these steps and let us know what you find.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top left of your menu bar
- Click More Info
- Your MBP displays a summary screen, Click "More Info"
- Your MBP displays a more detailed information tree. Click "Serial-ATA" under Hardware
- your MBP displays information on your hard disk. Look towards the bottom of the display. You will see the name of your hard drive. If you have not renamed your computer, it will be Macintosh HD. Below the name will be your hard drive's "Capacity" and "Available" in GB's. Let us know what these two readings are

Very basic questions about hard drives

I'm upgrading from vintage Beige G3, so much of the jargon about internal drives is new to me.
My MacPro will come with an OEM 160 GB drive. I will use this for my primary boot drive -- OS and Apps. All my data, photo files etc. will be kept on my second/third drives. I do not plan any sort of RAID setup. Windows is going nowhere near my Mac.
For the extra drives --
1) SATA? SATA II? What's the difference and is it critical?
1a) What is a "raptor" drive?
2) Does size matter (we're talking about GBs here, guys...)
3) Reliability is more important to me than speed or noise. We're a long long way from any technical help or even UPS.
4) Do new drives need to be formatted before using them internally?
5) If I partition one of the extra drives so I can keep a clean, backup OS boot partition, I need to format it as GUID, correct? Or does that just apply to external firewire boot drives? Does it matter which partition will be the boot partition?
6) I've read discussions about firmware requirements for some drives. What's that all about?
I was leaning toward MaxLine Pro 500 GB drives, but have been reading (reading too much, perhaps?) and now have all the above questions/concerns. (Whatever happened to the good ol' days of "buy an IDE drive, insert, play"?)
Thanks for your patience with these questions. I need to get it right the first time because of our remoteness!

1. SATA 1 interface speed rated at 1.5 Gb/s; SATA II interface speed rated at 3.0 Gb/s.
2. Drive ratings/performance is determined by many factors. You can best find out about individual drive performance by visiting http://www.storagereview.com/ to see their benchmark results on various drives. You will also find some helpful comparisons at http://www.barefeats.com/.
3. As for drive specs see previous answer. Generally speaking within any manufacturer's category of drive models for a given size the fastest drive will be the most expensive. Manufacturer specs usually do not provide any idea about drive performance in real world situations. Only benchmark comparisons are really useful, and even those can be confusing.
4. Yes, you can boot an Intel Mac from an APM partitioned drive. You simply cannot install OS X from the installer disc because it will refuse to install on a drive that has not been GUID partitioned.
5. Some older Seagate 750 GB models were not working properly when installed in a RAID configuration on Mac Pro computers. Seagate provided a firmware update to fix the problem for those who already owned the affected drives.
I don't know where you got the idea that Intel Macs were "picky about such things." Nor that installing drives in a beige G3 was a no-brainer. The old beige G3 required a lot of mechanical effort to mount a new drive internally. You not only had to connect all the various cables, but if you had two drives on the same ribbon cable each drive had to be jumpered properly - one as MASTER and one as SLAVE. Some older ATA hard drives had two different jumper settings for a MASTER - MASTER solo and MASTER w/SLAVE. Some beige G3 models wouldn't even boot OS X unless it was installed on a MASTER drive. And, you could not install OS X on a large drive except by partitioning the drive with an 8 GB partition for OS X that had to be the first partition on the drive. RAIDs may work or not depending on if you ran OS 9 or OS X. At least to me that wasn't the "good old days" unless you were comparing installing ATA drives to dealing with SCSI. I would say that in your particular case you were lucky, and you never tried putting two drives on the same ribbon cable. Oh, and I forgot about the size limiting jumper on most ATA large drives to limit capacity to 32 GBs because that's all that was supported by FAT32. Oh, yes, and the beige G3's disk controller did not support drives larger than 128 GBs.

Question about hard drive, need help lol.

Hey I'm kinda new to the MacBook world and have a stupid question. I am getting a late 2009 MacBook unibody (white polycarbonate, model MacBook 6.1... I believe) I am switching the original 250gb 5400 rpm hard drive out for a Seagate Momentus XT 750gb 7400 rpm hybrid hard drive. I want to keep everything on the original hard drive and just pop the new hard drive and start fresh with Snow Leopard. I'm going to purchase the SL cd from apple but I do not have the original grey start up cd that came with it (my girlfriends little sister lost it). Do I need to call apple for that cd in order to start fresh on my new hard drive or is everything I need on the SL cd?
Also how do I go about wiping the whole computer when I put the hard drive in and use SL? I want to essentially have a completely clean laptop with a new hard drive.
Thanks for your help in advance.

The SL disc you get from Apple will do everything you need. When you nstall the new hard drive there will be nothing to wipe, the drive is the only piece of that Mac hat stores anything so you don't need to worry about that. Post back and let me know how that hybrid drive works out....I'm interested.

Question about hard drives older xraid

We have an "older" XRaid stocked with 14 250 GB drives, connected to an xserve with fiber channel. Our premium Applecare agreement for the XRaid expired a few months ago. Prior to that, when a drive would fail, I would simply get a replacement from Apple, but I always kept a good spare drive in a drive module so that I could swap it in while waiting for the new module. I expect some drives to start failing as they get older, and buying drives in Apple drive modules is very expensive (over $600 for a 250 GB drive, if you can even find them). So my plan is to just buy bare drives and pop them into the existing drive modules when needed. My questions are:
Are these drives ATA's or SATA's?
What is the maximum drive size that each drive can be? Can I pull out all 7 drives on one side or the other and replace them with, say, 500 GB drives? (obviously I would have to re-init the array). Any help would be appreciated.

>Are these drives ATA's or SATA's?
The XServe RAID uses ATA 133 drives.
> What is the maximum drive size that each drive can be?
That depends on the firmware version. If you haven't updated the firmware since you got the machine, then 250GB is as big as you can go. If up update the firmware you can use 750GB drives (the largest drive currently available in the XServe RAID).
> I pull out all 7 drives on one side or the other and replace them with, say, 500 GB drives?
If you're not worried about warranty/support or the integrity of your data, sure. Lots of people have reported success doing this. Just be careful regarding the drives you get. Do NOT jump on the cheapest, nastiest drive you can find - there's a reason why that 750GB drive costs $99. All drives are NOT the same. You need to make sure you get server-rated drives. Most consumer/home drives are rated for something like 50,000 hours MBTF at 20% utilization (your home machine isn't always on, and is often idle even when it is on). By comparison, server drives have a much higher MTBF at a higher utilization (as much as 500,000 hours at 80% utilization).
If you don't care about drive failures then you can use the cheaper drives, just be prepared to deal with the failures.
Also, make sure you get identical make/model drives for al disks in the array. Mismatching drives in an array is going to cause a huge performance hit since the drives are not in sync.

A question about Logical Disk Performace collection Rules and how the Data is displayed in a Report view

Hello
I am currently on SCOM 2007 R2 CU6 and Window Server Operating System MP version 6.0.6989.0 (I cannot use the latest version of the MP as we still have some Windows 2000 Servers we need to support, yes I know :( )
Any way the issue is, I have never found the Logical Disk performance counter data very reliable from SCOM.
For example, I have a Windows 2008 R2 Server and when looking at a local Logical Disk (which holds an SQL temp DB on a busy SQL Server) and look at the performance counter
The SCOM collection rule is called "Collection Rule for Average Disk Seconds per Transfer"
The actual Windows Perfmon counter is called "Avg. Disk Bytes/Transfer"
if you look at the description of the above Perfmon counter it is described as
"Avg. Disk Bytes/Transfer is the average number of bytes transferred to or from the disk during write or read operations."
The problem I have is as follows:
The resulting SCOM performance chart over several days (which has a scale ox 1x) states the value never reach 3 (e.g. maximum wa s 2.7 say). I cannot believe the a drive holding the tempDB databases for a busy SQL Server does not transfer more then 2.7 "bytes"
of data at a given to to its tempDB databases!
Indeed when I look at Permon on the Server and looks at this counter over say 20 minutes or so, the figure is often in the 10,000 or 30,000 bytes etc. It does fall back to 0 (zero) momentarily but mostly it is in the 1000s, or 10,000s etc.
Therefore when my boss says show me the "Avg. Disk Bytes/Transfer" and SCOM says it has not exceeded 2.7 over the last business week (i.e. the chart never peak above this value on the chart with scale 1x) he naturally does not believe it!!
Any advice please regarding the above. Is it the fact if the counter ever falls to zero it messes up the SCOM report charts?
Thanks
AAnotherUser
AAnotherUser__

Create your own collection rule, to mirror the sample times, and what not. Look at the data from your rule vs the mp default rule. It probably has to do with the chart scale imho.
Regards, Blake Email: mengotto<at>hotmail.com Blog: http://discussitnow.wordpress.com/ If my response was helpful, please mark it as so, if it answered your question, then please also mark it accordingly. Thank you.

Questions about streaming disk, firewire and SATA raids.

I have two internal drives, one for applications/system and one for audio, which had been suitable up until recently. I recently added Ivory, and some addons to the BFD drums. The BFD Deluxe has significantlly more velocity layers, and is placing a strain on computer and drives.
I moved the BFD drum data onto an external firewire 800 (because of data size) The BFD drums seem to be having a hard time keeping up, (it glitches and stutters).
I have 3 gig of ram, so I guess I'll add more ram. But I'm unsure about SATA raids. Is it better to add an external firewire RAID?... Mac Guru, has some reasonably priced kits. Has anyone had experience with them?
There is a 3 drive bay which you can put inside your G5, but I have concerns it will draw too much power and generate too much heat.
Lastly, if I buy a 4 bay external raid, can i create a 3 drive raid, and keep 1 one drive as a seperate drive (do I have to stripe all drives in one enclosure, or can they be seperate?
Any insights would be helpful.. thanx

depending on whether you use eSATA or FW, you have differnet options as to how you mount the drives as volume(s) to your computer. FW pretty much limits you to a single logical volume, although it could be RAID-0 or in some rare instances, RAID-5 with certain enclosures.
eSATA, again, depending on the specific enclosure, can mount all the drives as a single volume, but you may have the option to mount multiple logical volumes... like the 1 RAID-0 and 1 independent volume like you mentioned.
earlier tonight i recommended this drive to someone else for a laptop application...
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10724
for a desktop application, you would probably go with their 3.5" solutions since buss power is not important to you.
this might not be accurate, but this is my understanding of highest read/write performance to lowest in terms of general specs (certain products may have advantages / dissadvantages depending on the implementation) all RAID-0 volumes are assumed to be 2 drive RAID, although it is technically possible to do more with certain hardware.
1) RAID-0 eSATA
2) RAID-0 FW
3) RAID-5 eSATA
4) single eSATA
5) single FW
6) RAID-0 USB2
7) RAID-5 FW
8) single USB2
9) RAID-5 USB2
RAID-5 is a real wild card here because a 3 drive image is really not the intended configuration for RAID-5... more drives is preferred before you start reaching theoretical efficiency and the actual XOR engine or lack of one can drastically affect your performance levels.

Question about Installation Disk

This is a stupid question but can I use my installation disks that came with my macbook (tiger) and use it on my powerbook G4 (panther) to upgrade my Powerbook to tiger osx?
Feel free to mock me.

No, installation disks are specific to a particular model of Mac (aside from the fact that you wouldn't be able to use Intel install disks on a Power PC Mac). You would probably see a message something like "This version of OS X cannot be installed on this system".
Matt

Questions about Hard Drive Replacement

I am debating putting in a new Hard Drive 100GB. I am not very technical but have changed memory in my MacBook to 1GB. I am a bit nervous about doing this. I have read the Apple Doc on doing it and was wondering about the tab. How does the tab connect to the new drive? Is it all as easy as it looks? Just pop the old one out, put the new one in and reboot holding down the c key? Reformat the drive and then install osx? I was wondering how many people have already done it and their experiences with it? Thanks

On a MacBook, the HD swap is very simple. Because the drive is SATA, the connections are sturdier than former ATA drives and you don't have to worry about snapping off the connecting pins.
The white "tab" used to pull the drive is just a piece of thin plastic glued onto the tray. Not the most sturdy stuff, but it'll do it's job. When you pull, just pull straight out - don't twist or turn the tab! Same goes for inserting the new drive: push straight in so it stays aligned with the rubber mounting rails.
*If you want to save the data, the best way to install a new hard drive is to:
1. Buy the new drive AND an external firewire case (USB will also work)
2. Put the new drive in the external case
3. Use "Carbon Copy Cloner" to duplicate your existing drive to the external one
4. Physically swap the drives and OSX should boot from your newly installed drive as if nothing changed.
Once you upgrade to a 7200RPM, the following things will be noticeably faster:
System Startup
Opening of any application
Anything that requires lots of HD reading/writing.
The last category includes any video/sound editing, such as Garageband, iMovie and iDVD. Shuffling through your iPhoto collection should also be faster. You might not notice the difference though, since the MacBook is already pretty fast
I would definitely couple it with a ram upgrade as well. With a large amount of physical ram, the HD upgrade won't make as much of a difference.

Questions regarding hard disk replacement in MacBook Pro Early 2008 Edition

Hello -
You folks probably get this a lot but I have a MacBook Pro Early 2008 edition and would like to upgrade the base 200 GB 5400 RPM drive to a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 drive. I have a few questions regarding this, and would appreciate any feedback.
1) Does anybody know if installing a new hard drive in a MacBook Pro would cause the warranty to be invalidated? I don't believe a hard drive is considered a user replaceable part, at least from what I read, and I would like to know if replacing it myself would void AppleCare.
2) Does anybody have any experience with the Segate Montentus 7200.4? I'm interested in how reliable the drive is and how much heat it generates. I've quickly discovered that I can use my MacBook Pro as an oven in tight spots and would like to prevent it from cooking its own internals.
3 random) Does anybody know at what temperature the system actually overheats? I'm seeing 171 F and this is with smcFanControl turned up to the Higher RPM mode. I'm a little nervous when I'm running WoW and the system is averaging above 170 with smcFanControl totally cranked up to 6000 rpm.
Thanks everyone!

Thanks for that. I've had mixed results with both Seagate and WD, but less issues historically with WD. My experience with IBM/Hitachi makes is nearly impossible to recommend their products, so based on what I'm seeing the Western Digital Scorpio Black looks like the best bet. Do you happen to know if Apple will do hardware installations outside of warranty repair scenario's? Ripping open my only notebook to perform "involved" hardware maintenance is not something I'd prefer to do, even with my technical background.

SUPER SIMPLE DUMB Question about hard-wired desktop mac and wifi for iPhone

Sorry if this has been already answered a million times. I have a desktop mac with a cable modem ethernet internet connection. I want to leave this hard-wired and setup a wifi network for a laptop or iPhone. What's the cheapest easiest way to do this?? I've never done anything wireless before.

Could I just somehow split the feed from the the cable modem or ethernet cable and route part of it into an AirPort express??
Unfortunately, no. This would create "confusion" for the modem as it is only expecting a single device to be connected to it. To be able to support both wired & wireless clients, you would need an Internet router with a built-in Ethernet switch, like the AirPort Extreme Base Station. If cost is an issue, you do NOT have to use an Apple router. There are a number of other vendors, like Belkin, D-Link, Linksys, & Netgear, to name a few, that offer similar models.

New MBP owner with a question about OS disks.

Just got a new mac book pro, I didn't get the OS disks in the box with the computer. Did I get short changed? A lot of the what I've read, there seems to be a need to use the OS disks, specially when partitioning the drive.
Is it normal for the Macs to come without OS disks in the package or am I missing them?
Thanks

Just got a new MacBook Pro. I didn't get the OS disks in the box with the computer. Did I get short changed?
Yes. Where did you buy it?
A lot of the what I've read, there seems to be a need to use the OS disks, specially when partitioning the drive.
Correct.
Is it normal for the Macs to come without OS disks in the package
No.
or am I missing them?
Yes.

Question about applications Disk

My hardrive failed so I took it to Best Buy to get fixed under their psp warrenty. When I got it back they told me that they put on a different operating system(10.6.8) I have disks for 10.5.8 and now I don't have any of the applications (iphoto, etc) installed, can I use my applications disk that came with my 10.5.8 OS Disk? or do I need one specificallyfor 10.6.8? Also my system is running really slow now since the new OS was installed, any idea why?

How much memory does it have?
Leopard requirements/10.5.x...
    * Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor
minimum system requirements
    * 512MB of memory (I say 1.5GB for PPC at least, 2-3GB minimum for IntelMacs)
Snow Leopard/10.6.x Requirements...
General requirements
   * Mac computer with an Intel processor
    * 1GB of memory (I say 4GB at least)
    * 5GB of available disk space (I say 30GB at least)
If I were you I'd erase & Install 10.5 again.

Question about Hard drive Space and Logic Pro

We just installed Logic Pro 7.2 (and Tiger) onto our Dual G4. We have nearly filled the bootup drive, with tonnes of space on our other hard drives (80GB and 100GB). With only ~4 GB left on the startup drive, will this cause problems with Logic Pro? We have more than the recommended RAM, but I was wondering if the hard drive space might be an issue, like with iDVD where you need ~8-10 GB free to burn a DVD.
I've been considering copying things over from my startup drive to my 80GB drive (which has tiger on it too)and making the 80 GB drive my new startup drive, but it's a bit of work and if I don't need to do it right away I don't want to bother. What is the recommended amount of free hard drive space and memory for Logic Pro to work well? I personally like to have ~10GB free for anything, but that might be tricky at this point. I want to know if I should go through with the hassle of moving things over or wait a bit and see how it goes. I've not ahd a chance to use the program yet, but I'd like to set it up and keep it working smoothly once I start to use it. Any advice or experience from anyone in this department?

Your best off having at least 25% free space of any hard drive.
With Logic, It is a good idea (though not necessary) to have your OS and apps on one HD, and your song files and samples (and other files) on another. I would also suggest that you get a hard drive with a speed of at least 7200rpms.

Question about hard drive space used

If I run OmniDiskSweeper to sweep my 15" G4 laptop hard drive, the total file size calculated is 31.3 GB. Likewise, if I clone the hard drive to an external drive using SuperDuper!, the total size used on the external drive is 31.3 GB.
However, if I "Get Info" on the laptop hard drive, the Used size listed is 41.9 GB. Likewise, 41.6 GB is listed as "used" in the OmniDiskSweeper Drive List window, as well as in another utility. I suspect that the 41.6 value is picked up from the Finder.
What could be the reason that Get Info lists the space used on the hard drive as 10 GB larger than the total size of the files?
1.5 GHZ PowerPC G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)
Dual 2 GHz G5 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Hmm, I think I have a possible answer. I had to download OmniDiskSweeper and open the help from its Help menu to get this answer.
It says in the help for OmniDiskSweeper:
"OmniDiskSweeper only displays files that you have access to from the user account you are logged into. Files in restricted folders are not available and their sizes are not included in the total file sizes you see."
So, if you have other user accounts, then those files won't necessarily be readable and hence not counted in OmniDiskSweeper. There may also be a few system files and folders that might be unreadable and hence not counted. That should be fine since you probably shouldn't be randomly deleting system files.
I've also noticed that OmniDiskSweeper shows slight variations of total sizes in its different windows, so it's not too precise. That probably comes from the dynamic nature of hard drive use by the computer, and OmniDiskSweeper trying not to use too many cpu cycles updating incessantly. Just guessing on that part though.
The 10GB is most likely other user accounts or something else not readable from your own account. The Finder lets you know of course, but OmniDiskSweeper only presents to you what you have permission to access. That doesn't necessarily mean you'll also have permission to delete those things.

Question about Hard disk

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for