New Mac G5, Advice Needed Re: Partition And Ext Hd Options

[PaulB]

Hi

I have returned to Mac after ten years in the Wintel camp. In a couple of days I take delivery of a Power Mac 1.8Ghz single processor with 1gb of RAM and 80gb hard drive. I will be using a digidesign MBox with protools LE and Sibelius. Can anyone help in regards to setting up the hard drive with partitions or if that is even necessary. Also I need advice on a fast but not too expensive external hard drive and flat screen.

Thanks in anticipation

[PristineRec]

I have been very happy with my Mercury Elite Firewire 800 from Other World Computing, very quiet, very fast.

www.macsales.com

I have also been reading of many very happy Mac users who have been purchasing Dell's new LCD monitors. You can get a 19"or 20" for around $550-$600 or so if you get in one of their special sales that they have very frequently.

I partitioned my internal drive so that I could have two completely different systems; one that I installed ProTools on, and another that I use for everything else. That way I can keep anything from conflicting with any extensions or system things that ProTools may have installed, and also make sure that the version of the OS that I am running works well with the version of ProTools that I am using. Digidesign seems to frequently take a while to make maintenence updates to match Apple's maintenence updates. I am currently running 10.3.8 on my "Internet and everything else" partition, and OS 10.3.2 on my ProTools partition.

Many think I am being overly cautious, but I have yet to have a crash or slowdown in ProTools.

[PaulB]

Thanks Pristine for taking the time to reply.

I'll check out those screens and hard drive on the net and suppliers and prices here in Australia.

[deaconblue]

Paul,

Depending on what other applications you may choose to install, I'd actually recommend picking up a secondary internal SATA HDD to store your music on and keep the 80GB as a single partition for your system, tools and applications.

You will find that if you are prolific enough you will run out of space on the 80GB drive quickly enough. Also, depending on the applications and where they store their resources, 80GBs will be just about enough for any Virtual Memory swap files and your software and resources. You can pick up an internal 160GB SATA drive for around $100 from Outpost.com (or Fry's if you have one close to you).

Best of luck and enjoy your new G5!

Deacon

[fastlanephil]

Ditto on deaconblue's reply.