Get the most from my External HD?

Natobasso

Natobasso

Tech-Bot 5000
I just bought a 7200rpm acomdata 250GB firewire (and usb 2.0) external hard drive.

My question is, how can I use it to the best effect with my iMac 17" here at home. I do home recording as well as graphic design, lots of big photoshop files (I already know about "scratch disk"). I need tips on how to use the hard drive to increase RAM performance, as you could do in OS 9, or to get some other benefits from it other than just more hard drive space.

Any ideas are welcomed! :)
 
First hint: unless you have a newer system than an 800 MHz iMac 17", then you don't have any USB 2 ports, and no way to add that hardware. Your big external drive will be extremely slow as a result (12 MBit/sec - USB 2 is 480 MBit/sec - 40 times faster) , and almost useless for video or audio recording, way too slow. All you have now is a big backup drive, but absolutely not useful as an active drive with your apps.
Take this drive back and get a FireWire drive. many people say you get faster real world performance from firewire 400, than from USB 2, so go for that.
You asked about enhancing RAM with a hard drive. hard drive access is much slower than RAM access, so your best bet for more performance is to add more RAM.
 
Natobasso said:
I just bought a 7200rpm acomdata 250GB firewire (and usb 2.0) external hard drive.

My question is, how can I use it to the best effect with my iMac 17" here at home. I do home recording as well as graphic design, lots of big photoshop files (I already know about "scratch disk"). I need tips on how to use the hard drive to increase RAM performance, as you could do in OS 9, or to get some other benefits from it other than just more hard drive space.

Any ideas are welcomed! :)
Click to expand...


Just a simple miss read, I do it all the time.
 
I have tried my damnest to find tips on ways to use a firewire hard drive and have come up with nothing. zilch. And I found my wife online so I am no slouch when it comes to google.

The HD is firewire. Any suggestions on how I can utilize it to the best effect?
 
Well, you've got an extra 250GB of space -- what do you want to do with it? What did you buy the drive for?

OS X uses and manages RAM differently from OS 9, so you really can't use the FireWire disk for anything RAM-related. If you're thinking of "Virtual Memory" a la OS 9, OS X has already taken care of that. It's always on and always active and ready. Just install more RAM if you need more RAM, otherwise OS X's virtual memory (called "swap") takes over.

I would suggest using it to store your large video and PhotoShop projects on. Make a folder for your PhotoShop images, then store them there. Make another for video projects, and put them there. Free up space on your internal drive -- it's a good idea to keep a good amount of space free on your internal drive, since when they get too full, they start becoming unpredictable. Keep at least 15% of the total drive space free.

Don't muck around with moving your user folder to an external drive or trying to move Applications off of your internal drive. This will only lead to problems unless you're a guru with the command line and enjoy troubleshooting. Ignore suggestions that you should do this for performance increases.

Other than that, you've got 250GB of extra space. Anything you want to do with it is possible.
 
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