3 replies to this topic

[Marta Reis]

I was planning a dual boot (win7/Lion) on my 1TB Caviar Black but Im having second thoughts.

Which are the Pros and Cons of separate Drives?

What would you recommend?

To boost my system performance I need the maximum HDD speed I can reach.

Im working with video (Premiere, After Effects, FCP, DaVinci) and my boot drive performance is one of my  greatest concearns.

I will also include in the setup:
3TB seagate for Data Storage
1TB Hitachi for Backup

I'll have to check how many sata ports are still available.

Thx

[eep357]

Separate drives is waaayyy better. For starters Windows like to destroy any other bootloader when being installed, even if it's a windows bootloader from another version. Also you can format your drive in mac native GUID GPT/HFS+ which makes installing OSX far easier as well, no patched MBR installer needed and making your own installer USB's from scratch becomes a cinch. Also you can unplug the other OS drive anytime time your doing an install to be safe, if one drive fails you still have an OS to boot into, same if one bootloader fails you can still get on the internet and look for a solution and apply it. And if you got the drives and the room, why not? If you were on a laptop or decided to put both on another drive still for some reason, keep a linux live CD handy.

[Xented]

eep357 is right to say that you should always keep a linux live CD handy.  You never know when you will need to make changes from the terminal.

just and FYI if you are using mulitple operating systems and decide to go with the ext4 file system you can check out macfuse, fuse-ext2, and fuse4x to link thoose file systems to OS X.  I did it just the other day, very helpful if your running several diffrent operating systems.  I could not get my Archlinux distro to mount my OS X hard drive, but could get my ext4 hard drives mounted to OS X.

[Marta Reis]

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughs.

With all my doubts separate drives always seemed to me the most obvious option. I have space for it so why would I install both OS in one drive?


Like eep357 says:

Quote

if one drive fails you still have an OS to boot into, same if one bootloader fails you can still get on the internet and look for a solution and apply it

That sounds perfect!!!