On Apr 8, 2007, at 3:35 AM, Jan van Wijk wrote: > My plan is to get a new iMac 24", which is a pretty fast modern one > that should last a couple of years, with 2Gb memory and 500Gb disk. > > I am going to run Parallels on it to be able to run (many) other > operating > systems for testing purposes, and buy Lightroom for my photowork. > (having been using CS2 on Windows sofar).
Parallels allows running various versions of Windows simultaneously with Mac OS X. But I wouldn't consider that an ideal testing environment, if you're testing software for Windows. Apple's Boot Camp allows booting up the machine with either Windows XP SP2 or Mac OS X but not simultaneously, which makes for a better testing environment for Windows work or Mac OS X work as you're running in the specific environment without emulation or encapsulation. There are also a couple of different Linux operating systems that can be used to start up the machine. > My questions are with external/internal disk storage: > > 1) can you have a 2nd internal disk is such a system ? No, the iMac hardware is limited to one internal drive bay. If you want a multiple internal drive system, you need a Mac Pro tower. > 2) what external storage is recommended ? > I saw I have a choice of Firewire-400/800 and USB 2.0 FireWire 800 formatted to is the fastest of the three. FireWire 400 does better at throughput compared to USB 2.0, and USB 2.0 in conjunction with FAT32 and UNIX formatted volumes provides the greatest ability to plug and play with Windows and other systems since USB 2.0 is more widely delivered than FireWire. > Speed is of some importance, but I would like to be able to > share the storage with other (windows) systems too ... > That may mean using a FAT32 filesystem perhaps ? > Does the MAC support that natively with OS-X ? > > Or would an HFS+ external disk be muchbetter, and use yet > another cheap Windows compatible one just for backup ... I suggest formatting the startup drive or partition on which Mac OS X, the Mac OS X development system (Xcode and all its compiler/linker/ IDE/etc components), and applications will reside in Apple's "HFS Extended, Journaled" file system format. Other partitions and external drives can be formatted to FAT32 for maximum data interchange capability with Windows systems. Mac OS X can also read NTFS volumes but cannot write to them. HFS+ volumes are somewhat faster in terms of file system access than others, but the differences are small with modest size volumes. Large FAT32 volumes do get somewhat slower. BTW: the name of the computer is "Apple iMac". The name of the operating system is "Mac OS X". :-) Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
