Modifying my MacBook. Take a listen?

Alright, so I have a really big data management problem. My hard drives fill up obnoxiously quickly, so I'm always backing up onto my 2TB drive. I'm a musician as well, and I just find it much easier to have a separate computer, or setup for music, vs my photography and everything else. So, I was thinking of this. The hard drive in my 15" MacBook Pro is a 500GB hard drive. Non-solid state. For the time being, I'm avoiding SS because it's too expensive.

I'm thinking of replacing the hard drive with a 1TB hard drive, and making one 500GB partition, and another 400GB partition, then a third 100GB partition (give or take) for Windows.

The 500GB partition will be for my photography and everything else--my fool around stuff. The 400GB partition will be strictly for music, and the 100GB partition will be, again, for Windows for my occasional gaming.

Here's where I'm probably going slightly daft.

I need to back all that data up somewhere. So I was thinking of getting a second 1TB hard drive, and replacing my optical drive with the hard drive. I'll then convert it to a USB optical drive so I can still utilize a disk drive need be.

The second hard drive will be for backups, so I at least have some form of redundancy if my main drive fails. So, basically, my backup drive will be internal, and then I'll backup everything from the backup drive onto my 2TB drive.

Anyone know how difficult it would be to do that? I mean, it seems easy enough. My only worry is installing two copies of Mac onto two different partitions. I'm also worried about possible static electricity issues.

Do you use the machine in the same place all the time? If so get an SSD for OS/programs/working data and a Thunderbolt disk for everything else. Or buy a desktop, cheaper and faster, easier to use with decent keyboards and monitors.

If you use it in different places then a larger disk makes sense. Partitioning is pretty pointless though, other than needing a partition for windows, just use folders for data. Partitions give you nothing other than artificial limits on disk space. Just pay attention to the space used and offload to an external disk some time.

You could get yourself a 2-4 bay NAS, run it over gigabit Ethernet, and keep data on that. Not sure about performance, but for backups no problems.

Don't forget offsite backups. You have to assume your house will be robbed or burn down at the worst possible time. Online backups are less practical for these sorts of data volumes for most people.

What do you mean "installing two copies of mac onto two partitions?" Why would you do that? Just have one Mac OS and and two folders for data storage, unless for some strange reason a mac can't be made to do both. You're just wasting disk space and doubling the amount of maintenance.

tim wrote in post #16577710
You could get yourself a 2-4 bay NAS, run it over gigabit Ethernet, and keep data on that. Not sure about performance, but for backups no problems.

This!

Drobo time

Yea it all sounds too complicated. I would just get a desktop with a good monitor and lots of storage for main and keep the laptop for being portable. (of course that might break your bank) I have a imac and an air and the combination works pretty well.

Not sure what type of macbook you have but depending, you can use the DVD bay for the SSD and the OS and then get a 1tb drive to replace what you have.

Drobo are expensive. There are plenty of NAS vendors that do a better product for comparable or less money.

Two good things about NAS's - you can buy a four bay and put in 1/2 drives, and you can run RAID1 for better performance/data safety.

When people ask questions like this I assume a certain level of technical skill and experience, so forgive me and ask questions if I either give too much or too little detail.

Depending on which and how many games you play under Windows, you might find that 100GB is not enough. I had initially carved-out a 60GB Windows partition on my daughters dual-boot hackintosh and she filled that in 3 months on games. Windows dynamically sizes the pagefile and Windows folder according to the hard disk size, consuming as much as 22GB + RAM size (for the pagefile) on the disk. If you have 8GB RAM, Windows will use 30GB+ of your hard disk by the time you install updates. 70GB is still a good amount of space until you start downloading lots of games off Steam or Amazon.

I don't see the value of dividing your Mac partitions into general vs music. It is almost inevitable that, at some point in the future, one or the other of these is going to get tight on space and you'll either give up on the artificial separation or have to repartition. There is no performance benefit in multiple partitions on a single hard disk. I would suggest a single Mac partition per disk.

I would not run two OSX boot images on a single machine. It takes extra effort and discipline to do this reliably, more than I have the mindset to follow. Plus it doubles the space required and amount of time/effort needed for the OS, updates and backups. Unless there is an application you use for Music that significantly interferes with one you use for photo editing, (or vice-versa), and is not a good candidate to run in Parallels or VirtualBox, KISS is always the best approach.

Depending on your budget, you might consider replacing your system drive with an SSD in the 200GB range, and then putting a 1-2TB HDD in place of your optical drive for Windows and data. The SSD will make a noticeable improvement in the Macbook's performance. Alternately, if money doesn't allow for an SSD you can simply add a 1TB or 2TB HDD in place of the optical drive for data and save the time and trouble of reloading the OS.

Finally, while the convenience of having an internal drive for backups is appealing, nearly identical convenience can be achieved with a NAS or Personal Cloud storage device. You don't have to spend $300+ on a NAS RAID. You can get something like the Seagate My Cloud for $180+/- that would allow you to backup and copy files through your network while home, or the Internet while traveling. Having a single storage location will simplify backups as you can just point Time Machine at the network drive and let it do its thing. The other benefit is that if the Macbook is lost or stolen, by pointing Time Machine at your network drive you are less likely to loose any data.

tim wrote in post #16577790
Drobo are expensive. There are plenty of NAS vendors that do a better product for comparable or less money.

Two good things about NAS's - you can buy a four bay and put in 1/2 drives, and you can run RAID1 for better performance/data safety.

The advantage of RAID-1 is better data protection, but the disadvantage is reduction in performance, because each write request has to be duplicated to the second disk. There is a small benefit during read operations, but generally a RAID-1 setup will run slower than a single disk, particularly if used for backup storage.

bumpintheroad wrote in post #16577858
The advantage of RAID-1 is better data protection, but the disadvantage is reduction in performance, because each write request has to be duplicated to the second disk. There is a small benefit during read operations, but generally a RAID-1 setup will run slower than a single disk, particularly if used for backup storage.

Wouldn't a good NAS write the data in parallel? If you're doing it with your PC in software then yes it could be slower.

tim wrote in post #16577937
Wouldn't a good NAS write the data in parallel? If you're doing it with your PC in software then yes it could be slower.

Only if you have multiple processors and buses, and still there is a performance penalty.