Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/09/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]so you sill boot from disk zero but your user directory is in the raid? why not make the raid the boot disk? i am getting ready to buy a new personal computer, already switched my laptop to a mac and sometime in the next qtr, i want to change my pc to a 8-core 16 gig box with about 3 tera of usable space. does the raid card allow for multiple partitions of different kinds (i.e raid 5 and raid 0) I do live backups of my data every night and keep them on the fast disks, the programs on R5 since it is a bitch to load programs in win xp. On 9/6/07, Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> wrote: > This is utterly off topic, but I'm the barkeep here and I don't rant very > often. > I just finished some risky modifications to a brand-new computer and I am > utterly delighted. I suspect that what I have to say here is of interest > only > to performance freaks and computer engineers. > > My daughter had a summer job working at Apple, and as a (part-time) > employee > she was entitled to buy a small number of things at significant discounts, > and, further, she is explicitly allowed to buy them for relatives. So I > gave > her some money to buy me a Mac Pro with the maximum processor power that > the > law allows, one 500GB disk, and enough memory to be bootable. Since I > already > had a working computer, I felt free to dissect it and make changes. > > I found some certified Mac Pro memory for $100/GB in 2GB parts and filled > all > 8 memory bays: 16GB of PC3500 RAM. The 2GB parts are dropping in price > because the 4GB parts are starting to ship (at $600/GB; no thank you!). > > I also got my hands on the new Mac Pro RAID card, and 3x750GB/eSATA/7200RPM > disks. I built a 3-disk RAID 5 array out of it, and benchmarked it to drool > over how fast it is. > > So far this is just hardware diddling. Now came the scary part. I put my > home > directory on the RAID. I didn't want to risk making the whole system run on > the RAID, so boot and system functions still run on Disk0, which is > standalone. > > The Unix sysadmin in me wanted just to make /Users/reid be a symlink, but I > have enough scars and wounds from Mac OS that I knew it couldn't be that > simple. A quick remedial reading of the Netinfo Manager "documentation" > gave > me the courage to go muck with that; changing the Netinfo resource for the > home directory for user "reid" from /Users/reid to > /Volumes/HindolvestonRAID/reid" did the trick. I put in the symlink, too, > as > an act that is partly superstition and partly "can't hurt; might help". > > Shut down, restart, move all of my files to it with Retrospect, restart > again > just for good measure, and log on. > > Zooooooooooom. I've never experienced anything like it. You doubleclick a > big > klunky application like Dreamweaver or Illustrator or InDesign and it comes > up before you finish blinking. The RAID card tickles all of the disks, so > there's a lot of very quiet disk noise for a fraction of a second while > these > applications are launching. Safari launches in an unmeasurably short > interval. Photoshop launches in about 4.5 seconds and opens a new image in > about 0.1 second. Lightroom launches in 3 seconds. > > I think I can learn to live with this performance. I have to decide whether > I'm going to be totally anal and do Retrospect backups of the RAID 5 to > protect against fire and earthquake and other catastrophes. > > Brian Reid > giddy with power > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > -- ------------------------------------- regards, mehrdad