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I have a question for the people who know more than me about such things.

The plan:

HD1 - SSD as my boot drive.
HD2 - projects drive.
HD3 - backup drive.

I have a couple questions.

For my projects drive, are there any advantages to partitioning the drive?

I have a SATA drive in my G5 that I was thinking of using as my backup drive. It is a 1.5gb/s drive. I'm pretty sure that it will work with the 3gb/s connections in the Mac Pro. My question is, with the slower interface, will it slow down the performance of my other drives?

Thanks

The only great advantage to partitions IMO is the ability to wipe a partition when desires. It might also reduce the chances if a directory problem affecting all the data on the physical drive.

I also find it helps me stay organized and makes it easy to exclude an entire drive from Time Machine. This is especially true for data that is easily reconstructed, like VI libraries, which can hog s backup drive with unnecessary duplication.

I'd also consider adding another drive for sample libraries if you have a significant number of VIs. It seems to help them load faster when coming off their own drive.

+1 Every bay should have a drive and a few externals as well. You can NEVER have too much hard drive space, just like you can (almost) never have too much RAM or money. Unfortunately, the former usually precludes the latter.

Each SATA connection is independent and will auto negotiate the highest speed possible for the attached drive, up to the max SATA2 bus speed of 3 Gbits/sec.

And if you're going external, use eSATA (external SATA) drives and cases BUTT [sic] if you think you'll end up with a Thunderbolt system sooner rather than later, then external drives would probably be better off with TB. All that said, I have a couple of 800 FW drives that perform just fine in any audio or video setting I place them in.

But at the very least, put as many HDs in your machine as it will hold,. You WILL NOT be sorry.

If going eSATA, use a controller that supports eSATA Port Multiplier or else you are limited to one drive per available port. Some cards support the protocol; others don't.

If Port Multiplier is supported, you can connect a $100 breakout box that allows 5 drives to be connected - actually, you can connect 5 breakout boxes for a total of 20 drives per port (one of the 5 ports connects upstream).

I didn't know about the Port Multiplier issue before I bought a breakout box for my iMac eSATA port - totally useless for me. Should list it on eBay...

USB 3 is also available on PCIe cards. It is no faster than eSATA with 7200rpm mechanical hard drives. USB 3 is faster than eSATA with SSDs as the platter speed is your limitation. Yes, PCIe is supposed to be faster than the SATA bus but I only know what I read on the internet, yes?

TB is even faster, of course, but PCIe to TB will never happen.

Port Multiplier is cool unless you need simultaneous max read/write speed from multiple drives. With a Mac Pro's prolific SATA ports, which can be augmented with a PCIe card, PM is typically unnecessary. My MP has seven internal drives, each on its own SATA port (with one spare eSATA port for good measure).