While I was bobbing around the Caribbean on a MacMania cruise , I got some great news — Macworldhad buy a Modern Mac Pro for my usance , and it would come back home in Portland at the same clock time I did . For those who do n’t know , I ’ve been using my personal Power Mac G5 ever since I joinedMacworlda yr and a half ago — it just did n’t make much sense to spend a mass of ship’s company money on an only - somewhat - faster G5 , so I toldMacworldI was fine using my personal automobile . I was planning on supervene upon the G5 sometime next year , but now thatMacworldhas given me a new machine to work with , I wo n’t be doing that .

I ’m in the midst of a much - tenacious writeup on the Mac Pro , very similar to my three – partmagnum piece of music on the Mac mini from this spring . I ’ll be done with it shortly , but I thought I ’d take a mo to mouth about the Mac Pro and its four internal drive bays .

When I first saw the Mac Pro , I thought “ Geez , I ’ll never use up four intragroup movement bays ! ” After all , my G5 only had two , and I always found that sufficient . But now , after consume the machine in front of me for a couple of mean solar day , and contemplating how I ’m probable to utilize it , I come up that I ’ve filled all four bays very quickly . Not only are they filled , but I ’m already wishing there were at least one more .

Now you might inquire , how could I perhaps fill four intemperate thrust bays so quickly ? Well , here ’s how :

So there you have it — four drive bays filled , even though I do n’t have nearly enough datum to fill all those drive . Recall I mentioned a need for a 5th drive bay laurel , too . Why , you might ask ? Well , when OS X 10.5 is released , the Time Machine feature will want a hard drive to process with ; ideally , that would be an internal drive . I ’m hoping it will work with a partition on a drive , though , as I could then make the quaternary hard drive handle the Time Machine duties , too .

I ’d repartition the fourth driving ( usingiPartition , which will do the job non - destructively ) into three partitions : One for Windows , one for a minimal OS X system , and the third ( and largest ) partition for Time Machine data . To make this work really well , though , the fourth private road will need to have a lot of capacity — ideally it ’d be a TiB drive , leaving circumstances of space for the incremental Time Machine reliever of the other two drives . ( Remember , two of my cause are play like one drive . ) It ’s a good thing OS X 10.5 is n’t out yet ; hopefully , the cost of high - capacity SATA drives will strike down appreciably before the ship date !

If anyone has any thoughts on how I could support Leopard seeds , RAID 1 , and Boot Camp with something less than four drives , I ’d love to take heed them — perhaps I ’m missing something obvious .