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Hackintosh Hard Drive Options

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dmw16

Diamond Member
I am in the process of collecting pieces for my hackintosh and I am trying to decide on my hard drive configuration and I'd like some input.

Option 1
320GB Drive (OS, Software)
750GB External (Media, shared w/ other computers sometimes)

Option 2
2x 36GB Raptor drives in RAID 0 (OS, Software)
320GB Drive (media, etc)
750GB Internal (Time Machine)

Option 3
You tell me 🙂
 
Option 2 is going to be very noisy, have a lot of interacting and probably pulsating case vibrations, plus be twice as susceptible to failure (RAID 0 system drive).

One simple option I like is:
- 7200 rpm internal system hard drive
- 5400 rpm WD Green Power media drive (I like the WD5000AACS because it is 2 platters; I used to own a 1 TB Green Power and felt it was significantly noisier; same might be true of 750)
(this combination of two different rpm internal hard drives doesn't pulsate acoustically like two 7200 rpm hard drives often seem too)

If you need another hard drive for time machine, an external one (connected to an airport extreme?) might work well and can be connected after you've got your Hackintosh up and running, and stable and updated to your liking.

Good Luck!

edit: if you are going to do any video editing, I again would recommend using an internal media storage drive. My dad's iMac uses an external enclosure for video editing, and iMovie sometimes just freezes for a milli-second here and there, and that isn't there with an internal drive. That WD Green Power drive had seek times of about 14 ms on my Asus P5W DH Deluxe, so I suspect that transient lag might not be there for this type of application.

 
Thanks for the input.

I tried going the whole external backup drive, but I lost data that way once and don't want to do it again.

What about just 1 Raptor as a system drive (would 36GB be enough?) and then a larger 7200RPM for media and such and then a 1TB for backup?
 
If you haven't bought a motherboard yet, watch for some used Asus P5W DH Deluxe in the for sale forum.

It has an F8 option at startup that allows you to select boot drive if you want to run more than one operation system on different hard drives, and has an Easy RAID option where you just plug in two hard drives to dedicated SATA ports and I think you get SATA RAID in hardware (haven't researched whether this is Hackintosh compatible option, though). There were a couple that just lingered on the for sale forums for weeks, even at list price of around $85 - $100 (I paid $179 brand new for mine from Newegg because there weren't any on the forums when I bought 🙁)
 
My setup:

Boot: 300gb Raptor
Backup: 500gb Seagate (Time Machine)
RAID Set A: 2x500gb Seagate (RAID 0)
RAID Set B: 2x500gb Seagate (RAID 0)

Fast boot drive with larger backup system and a couple RAID sets for video editing. I don't worry about using RAID 1 on the RAID sets since they're only for temporary projects; I archive projects on my RAID 5 NAS.

I definitely like having the fast boot drive. If you need space, the Samsung F1 1TB is half the price of the Raptor and probably 90-95% as fast. If I had the cash, I'd RAID a bunch of Raptors together. The Raptor is noticeably noisy, even in my big steel case; the F1 is dead silent. You could buy a 1TB F1 for your boot drive and a 1TB F1 for your backup drive, which is what we did with my wife's hack. Nearly as fast as my Raptor and tons more space! Another great option is the 640gb 7200rpm drive; it's an odd drive size but it's one of the fastest and quietest models available and it's less than $90. You can't go wrong with that!
 
Is the 500GB backup enough space?

I found a really good deal on a 74GB raptor, so I pulled the trigger on that. I have a 320GB drive for storage and then will probably use my 750GB external drive for time machine. I'd love to build a massive array of RAID'd drives, but I just can't justify it. I don't do video editing (yet) and most of my intensive work is matlab which is RAM and CPU driven (wish I'd gone for a faster CPU maybe).

So you think the setup I have will be sufficient?
 
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