An overabundance of drives

Steve McCabe - 09:23am Apr 1, 2008 PST
Guest User

Hi, folks

I'd like to seek your input and sage counsel with regard to an issue my
wife's having at work. She works as a graphic designer in PC-heavy
organisation, and made the provision of a Mac a condition of her employment.
They bought her, back in November, a new Mac Pro. Leopard was the installed
OS, and so she bought an external FireWire 500GB hard disc for Time Machine.

Recently, following all manner of grief and headaches with power glitches
and failing hard discs (it would all take too long to explain...) here's
what is available to us:

Mac Pro
500GB internal hard discs (two of them)
250GB internal hard disc (one)
500GB external hard disc (one).

She's currently in negotiation with the IT manager (who seems to want to
blow smoke whenever he's faced with a question; when my wife asked why she
couldn't email attachments greater than 2MB via the company's Outlook
server, he first told her that this nothing to do with the company's server,
but because "Other ISPs only accept incoming attachments up to 2MB," and
when she called him on that, he then said it was because "You're trying to
send a MIME file [sic]") about how best to use these resources.

Here's his suggestion:

"Image of the current internal 250GB [sic, again]" on the internal 250GB
disc
System and applications go on one internal 500GB disc.
Documents go on the external 500GB disc.
Second internal 500GB disc kept in the workshop as a spare.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is the optimal means of exploiting
these resources. Here's what I'm thinking:

System and applications go on the internal 250GB disc.
The two internal 500GB discs are combined in a RAID level 1 500GB array to
provide data security.
The external 500GB hard disc is used as a Time Machine backup of the
internal 500GB volume.

I like my solution (gosh, there's a shocker): it uses all resources, and
provides a *very* robust level of data security, with both redundancy and
backups. In my humility (one of the most wonderful of my many wonderful
characteristics), however, I would be grateful for any other suggestions
that anyone might like to offer for the best way to use the devices that are
available.

Are there any functional or practical issues associated with my solution? I
realise that some things (Microsoft Entourage database, for example) do need
to be kept in particular places in the user's home directory on the startup
volume, but other than that, is there anything screamingly foolish that I'm
missing?

I look forward to wise and knowledgeable guidance...

Thanks
Steve