how would you set up these HD's?

I have some ideas as to how I would do this, but I wanted to hear from some of you how you would go about doing it. I haven't had to do this before and I would like things to work as seemlessly as possible.

What I am working with: 320GB @ 7200 in my MBP and 2x1TB @ 7200 in the form of a WD My Book Studio Edition II, which can be organized as 2 separate drives or in RAID 0 or RAID 1.

The 3D and CAD work that I do requires me to work in windows quite a bit. Because its a smoother workflow from the 3d and cad, I do most of my PS, Illustrator and InDesign work in Windows as well. I'll probably end up creating a 120-140 GB partition for Vista to be installed on.

I'd like to be able to access all the data that I have (currently about 500GBs) from both OS's. I would also like to be able to backup both the osx and vista partitions (hopefully automated).

I've read much of the Bootcamp thread, but haven't seen a discussion covering effective ways of backing up both os's with one backup drive as I think most people have.

Anyway thanks for any help and advice.

 

2 seperated external drives
1 formatted in hfs+ for mac backups
1 formatted in ntfs for windows backups
or raid 0 / 1 with 2 partitions
paragon or ntfs3G on the mac to read ntfs
and macdrive on the windows pc to read hfs+

 

Ditto what Denludi said.
you can use time machine on the hfs+ partition and backup your windows drive on the other.

 

cool thanks. Didn't know about macdrive...that definitely makes things easier.

 

I'm about to try and set this up tomorrow, but just wanted to clarify whether this was possible:

Can the 1 TB RAID1 drive be partitioned into multiple logical partitions formatted with different file systems? An example:

1: 50 GB formatted as HFS+ (for time machine)
2: 500 GB formatted as HFS+
3: 450 GB formatted as NTFS

I know it can be partitioned as above....the question is whether it can be done with RAID1.

Thanks

 

. . . RAID1 on these mybooks is transparent/organised at the hardware level, so it doesn't affect any end-user partitioning preferences.

Windows is clueless about GUID-partitioned HDDs, so I would partition then format the HDD from windows, making three NTFS primary partitions of 440/440/50 respectively [1TB marketingspeak roughly = 930GB].

OSX will be able to see & read from any NTFS partition without a third-party kernel extension, & to write to it if you have MacFuse [freeware] or Paragon NTFS installed.

Having made these partitions from Windows, I would reboot into OSX & use Disk Utility to 'erase' the second & third partitions, reformatting them as HFS+ volumes.

Windows will not be able to see the contents of HFS+ partitions unless you buy/install MacDrive [which also enables writes to HFS+ volumes], or HFSExplorer [freeware] which enables browsing/reading.

 

Excellent, that info was exactly what I was hoping for.

 

. . just to satisfy my curiosity; why only 50GB for Time Machine?

. . or did you mean 50GB for (say) an iTunes shared library?

 

Actually its likely to be somewhat higher than that. Have to determine the final number after everything is installed. The short of it is I'm hoping to keep the HD on my mbp relatively free. I'll keep my 3d/image library, media files, and older projects solely on the backup drive and drag them to the mbp hd when I need to work with them (which'll happen mostly on the windows partition; most of the important backups will be from here as well). The only thing of any real size (45gb's or so) that I foresee on the os x partition is my itunes library.