Gary, You urgently need to increase your Mac's hard drive capacity.
I have a Mac Pro 5,1. Straight after buying the Mac I bought two 1TB hard disks and added them as a Mirrored RAID array, using the RAID creation part of Disk Utility. I also added a 4GB DIMM to join the 3 x 1GB DIMMs already in the machine. I then used the master DVD to install MacOS 10.6 on the RAID array. I then made the RAID array my master disk and started installing onto that array the various apps that I use. The array gives me 1TB of space, but as it copies everything onto both 1TB drives I have an automatic backup if there should be a mechanical drive failure. I use the old hard drive that came with the Mac Pro as a backup and scratch drive. I also use the system on that drive to boot to now and again to allow me to run Disk Utility and Disk Warrior on the array. I still back up my important files to DVD fairly regularly and make sure that one copy of the DVDs goes offsite to a friend's cellar in another suburb. Over the last 15 years I have generated about 500 CDs and DVDs that now reside in that cellar. I also have copies here in the cupboard. I should really get a fourth drive and use it as a time-machine backup drive. I had a mirrored RAID array in the G5 that was my previous main Mac, and one of the two drives had a catastrophic mechanical drive failure. Bought a semi-equivalent drive the next day, installed it, and the RAID software rebuilt the array on the new drive! That showed me the advantage of a mirrored RAID array. Got my current drives and memory from <http://www.macsales.com/>; excellent service. Give a yell if I can be of any help. On 22/03/2011, at 10:08 AM, gary dorn wrote: > > Howdy > > My MacPro 2.66, 3GB RAM, Mac OS 10.5.8 , a 500 GB harddisk , says it has > only 17Gb left. > > In the past week, its been getting spinning ball of death, which meant I have > had to force restart. > Usually occurs when I have a number of Pages, Numbers and PDFs open and I go > to open a 3D imaging software ( google earth, BoA etc) > > Is this a sign I need to get another Hard disk? > > thanks > -- > gary dorn > north perth > > > > -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- > Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> > Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> > Unsubscribe - <mailto:[email protected]> > Regards, Ray Forma Mob +61 (0) 428 596938 -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:[email protected]>
