Installing 2nd hard drive?
 

First, let me start off by saying that I am making the move from the PC world to the Mac world for the first time and am going to be getting a Mac Pro. While in the Apple store for several hours, it was recommended that I get 2 500gb drives, where the second one is a RAID config, mirroring drive1, for backup purposes. First off, is this recommended? Second, I wanted to get a Seagate Barracuda drive for the second bay instead of the Apple drive, but Apple will not install and set up this config for me with a non Apple drive. How difficult is it for me to install this second drive and set up the RAID config.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Welcome to the world of Mac and you have landed in the right place for help and advice ;-)
I would go DIY !, It is not too hard to set up the RAID, you will have to effectively boot from DVD install disk, run Disk Utility from top menu, create the RAID then install the OS from scratch. It will be a good learning curve. You must also understand that RAID mirror is not really backup as such. It provides redundancy in the event of hard disk failure. I would read further on this. It is generally used on servers that need "redundancy" but it is only a very basic safety net against hard disk failure.

Personally i would also buy a 1TB drive as a Backup drive, providing a rotating or on going incremental backup of your main drive. What are your key uses for the machine?
Video/Audio/Graphics ??

Do not buy "apple" drives make an informed choice ie. Seagate or Hitachi SATA drives.

Adding a second (or third, or fourth) hard drive is very easy on your Mac Pro. Just unlock the drive rack, by pulling the latch unlock lever fully up. Pull out your choice of drive carrier. Screw that carrier to the bottom of your new hard drive, and slide the carrier back into position. It almost takes longer to type this, than to actually do it...

OK, are you suggesting that I install the OS from scratch? I am a PC man, not a Mac guy...yet. How do I order the Mac from Apple and use Seagate drives? I guess that means I will have to set up the machine myself. I can barely navigate through Leopard as a novice user. In terms of usage, I am a hobbyist and do some video rendering from videos taken from my digital camcorder. I get a bit creative, but no means is it anything professional. I am using Photoshop CS4 for photos I take, again as an enthusiast. I have 37GB of music in itunes. I have been doing all of this on my PC. I have a Dell computer running Windows XP with a Pentium IV 3.4ghz processor, 2.5gb of ram, a Gigabyte x600 128mb graphics card and a 320gb hard drive. I have 2 external drives hooked up, and use a backup program called GEnie Backup Manager Pro to do incremental backups of my files and folders only. I also use Acronis TrueImage to create an entire disk image.

Thoughts?

If you want to use RAID there is a lot of work to be done. Most people don't use RAID and it looks to me that you don't really need it.

If you just want to throw another drive in the Mac Pro for backup using Time Machine, that's relatively easy.

Even easier is to buy external drives and use them for backup, or reformat your current external drives and use them for backup. I think that's the course you should take.

You don't have your new Mac Pro yet, do you? You can do anything you like with the software that comes installed - and you have reinstall disks that will come in the box if you have a plan to change the factory setup.
The Mac might come from Apple with Seagate drives. Apple doesn't make the drives they use, same as other PC manufacturers who don't make the hard drives they use. They get the drives from the same manufacturers - Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, etc. You have no way to determine which one you get without looking at what it actually comes with. If you get a Seagate, for example, you can add a drive from any other manufacturer that you like. If you want to pair up with a similar model from that same manufacturer (for that RAID system), then nothing prevents you from getting another drive just like the one that's in the system already - doesn't have to be from Apple.

btw - it's much simpler to add internal hard drives (up to 4 total), than adding internal drives to your old Dell. You can even have one hard drive completely dedicated to a Windows install, and still continue to use Windows (if you really want to) - all without adding partitions to your OS X boot drive. It's one advantage to having the multi-drive setup in that Mac Pro, eh?

An additional consideration is that a mirror-RAID is -not- a good backup solution, although it is good protection against hardware failure. Since data is written simultaneously to both drives, file system corruption will hit both drives at the same time if it occurs, and so you haven't really backed anything up! You'd be better off leaving them independent and then cloning one drive to the other periodically. Or better yet, use the second drive in an external enclosure and back up to it. Really careful people make multiple backups and keep one off-site in order to ensure that fire or flood doesn't cost them their data, but most individuals can't afford such precautions.

I don't suggest that mirroring is a bad idea; it just isn't a good backup strategy.

Joe VanZandt

It is so easy to change the drives in a Mac Pro that when I go on vacation I take the 90 seconds to open the case, slide out the drive sleds, and put them in the safe.

(Takes another few seconds to permanently add or remove a drive because you have to turn a few screws that secure a bare drive to one of the included sleds..but that's about it)

I do not have the Mac Pro yet. From the sounds of what everyone is saying, I am just going to get one internal drive, and get one or two external drives, and backup files and folders to them. I will also make a baseline system image of the disk, in case I have to reinstall. Maybe in the Mac world, Macs don't crash, but in the Windows world, for the past 5 years, I have to reinstall XP every 3-5 months on average for crashes, performance issues, you name it. Are there performance tweaks necessary for a Mac to fly, or will it do that out of the box? Again in the Windows world, I have had to install various utilities and had to tweak the registry as well as other software and power management options that did make a measurable difference.

I've been using and supporting Macs for 10 years or so. Now I have an MSI Wind so I'm dipping my toe into the Windows world. The difference is huge. On the Mac side, just keep it simple. Use the tools that Apple gives you when you have a problem. If you use a third party app to tune or tweak something, you will often get yourself in trouble.

On the Windows side it seems to be the opposite. If you don't use third party apps you could be in big trouble, and the most complex solution to the problem is probably the best one. After having this little Wind for a month I have a better understanding of the mistakes that very advanced Windows users make when they move to Mac.

I install Mac OS X only once: to set up a new machine. If I ever do an install from scratch again, it's because I bought a major upgrade, like 10.4 to 10.5. Most OS X issues can be resolved without a complete reinstall. One action that sometimes helps fix odd problems is to run the last OS updater, like 10.5 to 10.5.5, which is like running the last service pack in Windows. But that doesn't require changing or restoring anything.

"Macs don't crash" is a lie, don't believe it. But you should expect crashes should be rare to nonexistent. It's important to know what's really going on. OS X itself is solid. I can achieve weeks of uptime with it. But individual applications can crash, usually the fault of the app itself, not the OS. The entire OS can also crash, but this should never be accepted as normal. It is usually because there is a hardware bug or a bug in a driver that interfaces with hardware. Apple has no special powers to produce defect-free products, but for example if it is a hardware problem, once that motherboard or whatever is replaced with a good one, OS X should be bulletproof.

P.S. I do like to keep complete bootable clones of my system volume. Bootable clones are easy to create and keep current with software like SuperDuper. If my main drive were to fail, I could simply install a new drive, clone my backup back into the new drive and I am back in business without having to start from a baseline and add everything back.

I run Microsoft 2003 Server x 64 on an AMD machine and it has not crashed---ever. It runs 24x7 for more than 2 years now. It is restarted when a software update requires it. It is usually badly-written software that causes Windows to crash (often games); rumors of its instability are exaggerated. Now, I know this is not XP, but I think XP is also more stable than popular lore has it. OS X is rock-solid, I grant, but the core of NT Windows is also very stable. One can prefer Macs, even strongly prefer them, without exaggerating the weaknesses of Windows. That Vista was a disappointment is granted even in Redmond, so no use flogging that horse.

Joe VanZandt

I think we are all confusing the OP with a ton of semi-off-topic discussion.

Most people don't need RAID.

It's generally pretty easy to install a drive in a Mac Pro: http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Mac...dDrive_DIY.pdf

You can also use external drives, however they take up more space because they are outside your Mac. I recommend Firewire drives, as they are generally faster/more reliable than via USB.

You shouldn't need to reinstall anything when you get a new Mac. If you need to reinstall for some reason, that is also pretty easy.

One reason to install when you get a new Mac is to do a custom install where you leave out all the printer drivers, foreign fonts, and apps you don't want. If you exclude them, you can save several GB of space. It is easier to exclude them during installation, than it is to track them down and remove them by hand later. Also, if you do not need iDVD or GarageBand, they come with several GB of templates and samples, so you can also exclude those from an install if you want.

Your right, ThreeDee. If a moderator would kindly remove the last post of mine from this thread, I would be most appreciative.

Joe VanZandt

Thanks everyone for all the great feedback! To address some comments, XP is for the most part, pretty reliable. I have found the problems to be with other apps screwing up the registry. Also, after a while, Windows seems to get bogged down. I think the registry just gets clogged up, and I know there is virtually no spyware or malware on my system. I know this is a little off subject, but what is the consensus about running an antivirus program on a Mac? Also, where is the best place to buy a Mac for the money? I think Mac mall is the cheapest, but then I guess Apple will not transfer all my stuff from my PC to the Mac without a charge. Thoughts?

Antivirus software on Macs is a hotly debated issue. Generally, as long as you are 'smart' and don't download random programs from fishy sites, or from fishy emails or IMs, you should be fine.

Some companies are actually targeting people who are looking for Mac anti-virus software by using scare tactics. (I'm looking at you, MacScan and Intego)

If you do want to use antivirus software, there's the free ClamXav, although I find it to be a bit clunky to use sometimes.

Then there's the usual commercial AV software, but I'd stay away from Norton/Symantec.

When purchasing a Mac, all the stores usually sell them at around the same price (due to Apple's reseller restriction maybe?). I'm not really sure which one would be the best to buy from.

The price differences won't be found in the machines themselves, most likely, but in what goodies the seller bundles with it. As ThreeDee indicates, Apple pretty much eliminates price differentials in the products, but some may have printers or extra memory or some such thing added in. Sometimes that does add value to the purchase, but sometimes it doesn't. How many cheap ink-jet printers can one reasonably use, after all? Having said that, I often to buy from MacMall and they are generally reliable. I just get tired of filling out rebate coupons.

Joe VanZandt

Thanks, So back to the antivirus question. What is currently one of the top rated Mac AV software?

OS X.

Seriously. There is no need for AV on a Mac until there are Mac viruses in the wild. Statistically, it's inevitable that someday it will happen, but even then, it's really Apple's job to close any hole that a virus uses.

I've been using Mac's for over 20 years, and OS X since the Beta in 2000. I've never seen a good reason for AV on OS X. The Classic OS (9 and prior) did have a small need, but not OS X.

By the way, it's been so long since I had to install OS X that I can't remember when I last did it, and I support at least 6 Mac users in my family.