2 mac questions

[ryanbph]

I have a new mac computer and I wanted to know 2 things. Currently I have boot camp running with 32gb. Granted that will not be enough space. I had been looking at a drobo ( http://www.drobo.com/ ) for backup harddrives rather then have a bunch of external ones laying around. Is it possible to put windows on one of the drobo HD, and boot from that rather then have bootcamp?

My other question is, external blu ray rewrittable drive. Any recommendations? I was looking to backup my blu ray collection and wanted to know if anyone has used one on a mac or if they have any suggestions.

[naiku]

"Windows XP requires its own partition on your computer's internal startup disk. Boot Camp Assistant creates a second partition on your startup disk ..." page 7

from - http://a248.e.akamai.net/f/248/3214/1d/www.zones.com/images/pdf/apple_bootcamp_beta_setupguide.pdf

i guess reformat the windows partition make it slightly larger. any media files that can stay on the external would be best. that way your windows and mac partitions can both access them

[Sokkratez]

Drobo only connects via USB, doesn't it (unless it's been updated since I looked at it last year)? Wouldn't want to run an OS off that unless it were temporary (Linux off a flash drive or something). Sounds like you can't anyway.

Can you not add internal drives to Macs?

[ryanbph]

From there website drobo has a FireWire 800 port as does my iMac. I would assume that this would alleviate the speed issue. I have an iMac ( while I haven't researched it yet) I don't think I can add internal hard drives to it.

As for reformating the bootcamp partion, I just don't want to allocate all that much of my internal hd space to windows, nor do I want to reinstall everything again. From what I read on the mac forums, I would need to make a new boot camp parion if I wanted more space.

As for the drobo, I have about 800 DVDs, 15 hddvd, 30 blu ray discs and about 1000 CDs of music. That doesn't include the 14k songs I napstered back in the day (circa 2001 when I was into the file sharing scene) and the hundreds of songs I have purchases off of iTunes. What I would like is to get the 4 port drobo. Have one hd for my music, one hd for my movies, one hd for my .raw or .tiff photos/family movies ( I have a 2 year old) and one hd to run windows xp off of. Then I can devote my entire internal iMac hard drive to my programs/banking and editing movies/photos and have everything nicely organized off of my mac. I don't even need to have it be bootable, just as long as my parellels 4.0 can run the windows from the drobo I will be fine.

If the drobo allows me to run windows I can pick one up for my work mac pro. We need to run windows to print (there are no print drivers for engravers/sublimation machines on the mac) but I do all my editing in the mac side. With a drobo there I could use one drive to run xp, one for backup of the sublimation projects, one for engraving and one for the catalog/website images/pages.

[Koggit]

a) on a mac pro there's no reason to consider a drobo -- plenty room for internal HDDs

b) sounds like you want a home media server for your iMac, so build a home media server (it'll be the same price or less, more expandable, more versatile)

c) blurays are not worth backing up, you'd spend way too much to do it and i don't see the point, the external drive would be expensive then you're spending $5/ea on the blank discs.. not worth it at all and what's the point of burning them? if you're super worried about it for whatever reason then why not rip them but leave them on the HDD..

[ryanbph]

A). Great point

B) how do u go about doing that


C) at this current time I don't plan on rewritting them. I have a 2 year old that is getting into everything. While I am annally neat, my wife isn't. A blu ray readable drive would be fine.

[Koggit]

by media server i basically mean a networked PC that's used primarily for storage. it could be a HTPC, or just like a server you keep in a closet. that's basically what a drobo is: a small networked PC used only for storage. the benefit of building a PC to do the job is price (it'd be $150 - $300 depending on what you need -- like wireless, RAID, etc) and added functionality (it'd be a full-fledged computer, a universal turing machine, it can do anything). the downside is that it isn't as streamlined and easy to set up.

if you don't mind the price of drobo and don't care about any other functionality, which may be the case, then drobo isn't a bad choice. personally i'd go for the home server though.