itriix Posted January 9, 2010 Share Posted January 9, 2010 (edited) Hope everyone had a great holiday... Back to reality Anyways, I am doing some hard drive setup/rearranging... I thought i'd see what everyone's 2 cents are on an optimal setup for me. I am currently using an 8-core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB ECC SD RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB RAM 500gb = Main HD with software and work files *hip, ma, bla bla* 500gb = linux/windows/extra resources drive 1 tb = music/movs/archive 1 tb = educational 1.5 tb BACKUP for educational and Main HD I just purchased a 2tb drive so I now have: 2tb 1.5tb 1tb 1tb 500gb 500gb 6.5tb total I'm trying to decide on an optimal/efficient setup for my drives now. Thoughts: 2tb BACKUP 1.5tb Educational (since the 1tb is filled up) 500gb MAIN HD 500gb linux/windows/extra resources 1tb music/archive 1tb cache/work files? so i'm curious how others would organize this... For wear n tear on the drives, i know it's better to have things split up to multiple drives so that the needle on the drive doesn't need to jump all over the place if all the files were on the same single drive. should i stop using my MAIN HD for "hip/ma/shk/nuke" work files and actually DESIGNATE a drive for work? so in the above example, use the 1tb cache/work files drive for this kind of stuff? how about textures. for a while i believed it would be better to have textures on it's OWN resource drive seperate from everything else, but i've heard different stories why and why not this is good/bad... if i'm taking my work to other computers or passing off my files/ keeping textures in the actual "work directory" instead of on some external texture drive will make this easier for organization... bad side though, i tend to get tons of duplicates of textures as time goes by, whereas if all my work was referencing a "texture" drive, then this wouldn't happen. Well anyways, just wondering what everyone would do for this case scenario, Cheers! Jonathan Edited January 9, 2010 by itriix Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malexander Posted January 11, 2010 Share Posted January 11, 2010 Something that I've heard works very well is to get an SSD (80-120MB) and install your OS and applications on that drive, with zero user data. For critical data, 2 HDs in RAID 1 can give you extra security and a nice boost to read speed (though a slight penalty to writing and only 50% capacity, but drives are pretty cheap). If you need fast scratch, 2 HDs in RAID 0 are good for that. Also, having a lot of RAM installed (8-16GB) helps IO considerably, especially for frequently accessed files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Macha Posted January 12, 2010 Share Posted January 12, 2010 At home I got a small SSD with my OS and a few apps on it. The rest is on normal HD. It's very fast and convenient. Houdini uses a lot of memory sometimes so I had to change the temp files location because it filled up my SSD in no time. (I also did something to the pagefile location but i can't remember now what drive they ended up on. ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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