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external as boot?
I’m still tinkering with this system, G5 quad with two 500GB internals and I have a new question. The director bought the system with the two huge internals before she understood the configuration and now she’s wasting one internal on home disk/apps/FCP documents and has already run out of space on the other one. I wanted to investigate the possibility of running the OS and saving apps/FCP docs on an external drive (something smaller) so we can get some use out of the second 500GB internal. Has anyone done this? Any pitfalls I should know about?
Confusingly, Apple customer service says it’s fine because the externals through FW800 effectively run faster than the internal SATA’s. I ran that by someone at G-Tech and they say that makes no sense since SATA maxes at 135 megabytes/sec and FW800 maxes at 100 megabytes/second, but that it’s still an okay option, although they weren’t too mind-blowingly reassuring.
Thank you, as always, for any thoughts.
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4 Replies
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Maria-
It might be smarter to take one of those 500 GB drives out and put that in a SATA or FW enclosure and buy a new 250 GB drive from a place like zipzoomfly.com to install as your new system drive. They have the Hitachi 7200 RPM drives for about $106 each. I wouldn’t go under 250. A 160 GB would get too full too fast. I have just the basics and FCP Studio on my edit system, and it’s at 140 GB. 20 GB for headroom is cutting it awful close.
You run all sorts of weird risks running your system externally, from the cat (or anyone) pulling the cable on accident…to…to…well, it just doesn’t make for a sable system. FW drives are notoriously unreliable. If you must go that way, avoid LaCie. I have 5 of them, and none have let me down yet, but I certainly wouldn’t trust any of them with my system data.
I would lean towards SATA over FW. Enclosures are cheap, internal SATA cards are relatively cheap, you already have a SATA drive. Putting the drive in a FW enclosure probably would over all be cheaper, but FW gets flaky, which is why Apple has never officially approved their use with FCP. Enclosures and internal SATA cards can be found at places like wiebetech.com
debe
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That sounds like very sound advice. Thank you very much. A quick question in return. I have someone else advising me that if I’m running FCP 100% off memory cache that the program is never calling on the home drive, and so there’s no reason to NOT put media files on that drive too. Does that sound like a reasonable statement? If so, is it best to partition?
Many thanks.
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It’s never recommended to put media on your boot drive. There’s a whole lot more going on on a drive than you know about. Hard drive heads can’t be in two places at once. You need the drive available to swap information to the RAM. No matter what, you’re still asking the drive to access the project file, the OS and the media all at once. Media is such a bandwidth hog, even minimal amounts of data competing with it for access to the bandwidth is not recommended. If you watch your Activity Log, the RAM allocation for FCP fluctuates. Where do you think the extra data is living when the RAM allocation dips? Not in the RAM!!
I hear my internal drive spin up every now and again when I
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Thank you very much!
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