MacPro Studio Setup – Part I

Ok, so the new hard drives arrived.  Two gloriously bubble wrapped 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives from NewEgg.com.  Now, I have heard some complaints about their shipping, and about these drives – so I upgraded to FedEx shipping and both my drives seem to working flawlessly.  Installing a new hard drive in a MacBook pro is perhaps the easiest drive install I’ve ever done.  Just four screws for the caddy, and the rest was without tools and painless.

I have decided (since I already did a Logic install) that I will leave the “vanilla” logic install, including Jam Packs and all that jazz, on the 320Gb system drive.  After all it’s on the same SATA controller as the other drives anyway.  Henceforth, however, all samples, content, instruments, etc. will go on the Media Library drive – the new Barracuda.

All my project data goes on the other Barracuda.

It’s taking about three hours to copy over my 200gb+ of samples and instruments, but I am sure this is primarily because of the speed of the USB 2.0 external drive I am copying from.

Oh, as an aside, my MacMini is now my “main” computer – dunno what I am going to do with all those PCs I’ve accumulated.  I went ahead and purchased the elgato Turbo.264 and have to say that I LOVE it.  Whereas before if I was encoding a DVD to AppleTV, I could basically do nothing on my mini, now I can read email, even watch another video, while encoding.  And the quality is great.  I highly recommend this product.

More to come when the memory arrives, I load up a lot of instruments, and we try this rig out.