[Tommy Rudman]

Bob –

Far be it from me to insult you – I’m largely uninitiated in all of this so I’m still learning something new every day!

It seems both you and Simon agree that a 480GB SSD for booting is a good idea. So I will invest in this. Simon then links to a relatively expensive but extremely powerful-looking PCi SSD that seems to be a great investment for a scratch disk.

so that comes to a 480GB SSD for booting and a 480GB SSD for use as a scratch disk.

my question then becomes: where does my media storage go?

I have an old computer that I was considering buying HDDs for and converting into a NAS hub. Would this not be smarter than just sticking a bunch of HDDs in the Mac Pro itself? I could move my current 1TB HDD from the Mac Pro into the old computer and buy some new HDDs and set up some kind of RAID in there.

So: could I store my media on a separate ‘NAS’ device plugged in to an eSATA port on the PCi SSD? I understand that NAS is network-assisted storage, but is there not a benefit in connecting it directly to the PCi SSD? How else would it connect?

[Tommy Rudman]

Bob –

Thanks for your reply, which has certainly moved me forward in the decision-making process, but yet leaves me still a little confused–

You say at first that I should use my 1TB boot HDD to house my software programs, but then go on to suggest that I buy 1 x 480GB SSD to house them on instead. Are you telling me that SDD, if used at all, is valuable primarily as a boot drive?

What about a scratch disk? Is that not the best use of an SDD? Can the boot disk also act as a scratch disk?

And is there any reason why you’d suggest 1 x 480GB SDD over 2 x 250GB SDDs in a Raid 0 configuration for this particular job? Isn’t the latter around 2x faster in its read/write capabilities?

Are you suggesting that I buy an external Raid array and connect it to my Mac Pro using a PCI Raid controller?

So many questions, forgive me if the answers are relatively self-evident!

From what I gather from your post, you suggest:

1 x 480GB SSD for boot / software (and scratch disk?) use
External RAID array of HDDs for storage.

Would this provide me with not only a clean, empty and fast scratch/boot disk from which to operate day-to-day as well as reliable long-term storage?

Thanks again.