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To change the location of your Home directory, right/control-click on your user name in the Accounts pane and select “Advanced options...”. Then enter the path to (or just drag and drop) your new home folder into the “Home directory” field in the next window.
Dual Mercury Elite RAID
7,200-RPM desktop drive, but the fact that it’s smaller in diameter by about an inch means the heads don’t have quite as far to travel when they jump around to read data. Western Digital takes advantage of both size and speed in the Velociraptor series of drives. These are 10,000 RPM 2.5” (notebook-size) drives in a heat- dissipating sled that fits where any 3.5” drive can be used. The improvement on a Mac Pro is modest but notable. By swapping in a 300GB Velociraptor ($199 or less) we got a very nice little pick-me-up. Even though our boot time improved by a scant 26%, Photoshop CS5 launched nearly twice as fast (6 vs. 13 secs.) and Final Cut Pro improved by 32% compared to a 7,200 RPM 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black 3.5”.
RAID! - $$- $$$ XXX
Even if you choose to follow both of the above suggestions, you’ll still
Mac Pro Memory
have two empty drive bays in your Pro. If you’re working in a medium like video or animation that needs to access very big files very quickly, you can a pair of identical drives and use the Mac OS to create a RAID-0 array. A RAID (redundant array of independent/inexpensive disks) teams drives together for improved performance and/or security. A RAID-0 is the cheapest and easiest way to satisfy your need for speed. Data is “striped” as it’s written to a RAID-0 array, meaning that data is written to and read from the drives in alternating blocks, moving data at nearly double the rate of a single disk. It also takes advantage of the combined real estate of both disks (two 500GB drives give you 1TB of storage).
Before you get too excited, you should know that a RAID-0 twice as insecure as two separate drives. If one drive fails you loose allyour data. It’s a good place to keep captured video footage or render and scratch files but not the important project files (or your system or home directory, for that matter). You’ll want to make sure the drives you buy are identical. You can use Apple’s RAID Utility in Applications/Utilities to set it up.
This will give you what’s known as a “software RAID.” If you want even better performance with the advantage of portability, an external hardware RAID would be your best bet. For Mac users, a very good source for a complete, turnkey RAID-0 system is the OWC Mercury Elite- AL Pro RAID-0, which starts at $215 for a
38 MacDirectory
