Bought a harddrive, now what?

H

Hidden Gekko

3 Years and 100 Posts 0_o
Today I bought a 120 GB hard drive and successfully installed it into my G4. I intailized it and it works fine. So what are some options I have to do with it? I really don't know much about hard drives, I'm pretty much a n00b when it comes to hardware stuff.

Right now, its acting like a big zip disk, with nothing on it unless I add something.

Should I install 10.3 on it? Is there anything cool I can do with it otherwise? And what's RAID (heard the term before, don't really know what it does). Any easy way to 'add' the 120 GB to my existing 80 GB (I'm pretty sure this is possible by 'splitting' and 'sharing' the data between the two drives...)

yeah, so gimme the skinny on this sorta stuff :)

Thanks
 
Well heres some info on RAID(assuming you have more than one drive)
What is RAID?
what are the specs on the drive you have now: rpms, cache size, capacity? if this drive has a faster seek time you may want to consider using you old one for back up purposes and the new one as the boot drive...you could probably get a half decent shareware backup utility i have yet to see a good freebie though :-/ but oh well. good luck!
-mike
 
Depending what you do on your computer depends on what you can use it for.
Save your pictures/images especially if you use Photoshop.

You can install an OS on it. It does not matter which version. Then you have a drive to boot from in emergencies. I have 10.3 on a second drive at work. I have been learning the new stuff, and checking it out before I upgrade my machine at home.
 
Learned all about RAID in the help files, now I just don't know whether to do stripes or mirroring, or just leave it as it is. I bought it because I'll be in graphic design in college next semester, and I'll need plenty of space for projects. I'm cautious though, wouldn't want one disk to fail and lose practically everything. If I mirrored, I would essentially have 100 usable GBs of space, if mirroring just copies everything between the two disks. Hmm...
 
I would partition it. As mentioned, if this newer drive is faster, i would make it the master drive, and on the first partition, install your system (about 7gb partition). I have my 3 drives in 5 partitions.

Drive 1 (Master)
OS X partition
OS 9 / All my applications partion
Scaratch bin (application scratch disc/ extra storage/ downloads

Drive 2 (slave)
My work partition
video/ new media partition

Drive 3 is in the zip bay, just for backups.

I choose this due to my experience with system failures, and just the old saying... S#!+ happens. Once did I have all start to bomb on me for some reason, a system error did some odd things, but with Panther... not one panic, no problems, and longest uptimes since I first used Mac OS X.

Just configure your system to work for you, I know i always have backups of my things, some of which i burn to DVD+RW's. Just because you have a ton of hard drive space doesn't mean you should archive those important things every so often.
 
Keep in mind that if you do decide to make a striped RAID out of two disks that are NOT the same size, your RAID set will only be twice as large as the smallest disk. If you make a striped set out of an 80GB and a 120GB drive, you'll only have a 160GB striped array (80GB x 2).

Same goes for mirroring, but you'll only have a RAID that's as big as the smallest disk, so if you make a mirrored RAID out of an 80GB and a 120GB, you'll have an 80GB mirrored drive.
 
Keep in mind that if you do decide to make a striped RAID out of two disks that are NOT the same size, your RAID set will only be twice as large as the smallest disk. If you make a striped set out of an 80GB and a 120GB drive, you'll only have a 160GB striped array (80GB x 2).

Same goes for mirroring, but you'll only have a RAID that's as big as the smallest disk, so if you make a mirrored RAID out of an 80GB and a 120GB, you'll have an 80GB mirrored drive.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I guess I'll just keep it as an extra for now.
 
A second hard drive makes a good backup drive... keep any things that you don't want to lose if you have to reinstall your system from scratch. (Of course, this comes in handy more on my PC.) Put things like MP3s, program installers, things you download, etc. Makes it easier than having to backup things when the need arises.

On my PC the C: drive is used for installing windows and apps. I keep all my music, pictures, backup files, program/utilites/driver installers on the D: drive. That way when I have to reformat and do a clean install (which happens at least twice a year or more) I don't have to go hunting for CDs and floppys.
 
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