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Setting up Your New Mac
(or renovating an old one)
Your new Mac is ready to go, right? Yes, for basic uses. But with a little effort, you can increase performance, decrease clutter and crapware and get an optimal system right off the bat.
This page covers the general considerations in setting up a Mac system, focusing on a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro. The approach here is based on many years as a photographer, software developer, and general computer geek. It is also backed up by detailed research on the best ways to optimize Photoshop performance.
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Hardware installation and testing PERMALINK
Your new Mac has just arrived. Here’s what to do.
Install all extra hard drives and memory. It’s best to do this right away, after all, you want the system as a whole to work, so doing things piecemeal just adds more work. If you do encounter a problem, you can back out memory and hard drives to the minimum and start from there.
Do not forget that static electricity can ruin memory or hard drives; don’t wear a wool shirt while fiddling with the innards of your computer! Choose a well-lit surface for installation, and take your time. I recommend avoiding dinner, rum and children for this phase! Children caused me to re-insert two screws into the DVI port on my MacBook Pro, impossible to remove.
Memory — There is always a risk that memory could be bad, but with quality memory this should be in he 1-2% failure rate range. Always buy from a reputable vendor, and don’t try to save a few bucks on “deals”. Parts are graded by quality, and buying memory from the reject bin will lead to no end of headaches. See Testing Memory for Reliability.
Hard drives — Using DiskTester, verify that you are getting the expected performance out of your drives. Do not assume hard drive speed is optimal, especially with RAID — sometimes there are performance issues; these vary with drives and SATA cards, etc. DiskTester is the best tool available for verifying hard drive performance, and the only one for seriously testing reliability. For added confidence, run DiskTester’s command overnight on all your volumes (more than one DiskTester can run at once on different volumes).
Double-check that you’ve set up your RAID partitions, etc in a sensible way with appropriate sizes, etc. You can always redo things later, but it’s a hassle.
Consider your backup strategy, and make adjustments now if necessary. That means an absolute minimum of one external backup, and preferably offsite backup as well. Apple’s Time Machine can also provide a convenient half-solution: be sure to dedicate a backup disk for it should you choose to use it.
As the last step, install your applications and get to work! By investing effort in the previous steps, you know that any flakiness you encounter is likely the result of buggy software, not flaky hardware.
Start with a clean system PERMALINK
I never use the as-shipped system with a new Mac. This section details why. Read all the sections here to get the whole picture.
Cleaning up an existing Mac
If you don’t want to install a new system, you can do some amount of cleanup on an existing one. These tools might work for you. Be sure to make a backup before doing such cleanup tasks. These tools below are for reference, no recommendation is given pro or con— use at your own risk.
CleanMyMac
MacCleanse
Leopard Cache Cleaner
Eliminate bloatware PERMALINK
Apple’s extra software applications are very well done, but if you aren’t going to use them, it wastes needed space. Especially on limited capacity drives like the solid state Intel X25-M, chewing up 5-8GB of storage is not a good plan. On a hard drive it also means wasting the fastest part of the drive, since the system install lays down files on the fastest part of the drive.
A new Mac is loaded with “bloatware”, like 2GB of Garage Band sounds, language translations with 50 language you can’t read, drivers for 100 printers you don’t own, demos of stuff you’ll never use, etc. Wipe out all those barnacles you won’t use by re-installing the system software immediately after you buy your Mac, especially on laptops, where drives are smaller and slower: having unused files occupying the fastest part of the hard drive is crazy. During system install, customize the installation to not include any of that stuff.
Wiping out the as-shipped system is not only a good thing to do for disk space reasons, it’s worthwhile for seeing how a system software install works. With a new machine, you have nothing to lose, and you’ll then understand how to do it, should a Bad Thing ever happen.
Installing system software
Insert the system DVD and after rebooting with it, choose to wipe out whatever junk Apple pre-installed. Click through to the point where you can customize things. It is at this point you can go to the menu, choose , and partition the boot drive (if desired). For most users, a 64GB boot drive is plenty, assuming you’re following good hygiene by separating your data from the system software and applications (see below).
For the system install, pick and choose only what you need. For example, you probably only need one or two printer drivers (not 50), and most people don’t need foreign language support, etc. You don’t need demos of various products, etc. Uncheck everything you don’t need—you can always install it later without reinstalling the system as a whole.
By doing this, you will typically see a 3-4GB system install instead of 8-12GB. This is especially worthwhile on laptops with smaller hard drives, where the drive is much slower as it fills up. Less is more.
Separate data from system and applications PERMALINK
Boot from a dedicated system volume
Dedicate a hard drive for your system and applications (boot drive), and a separate one for your data. This makes for simple backups and higher performance, as well as fewer headaches — as you will find, sooner or later!
On laptops and other Macs with only one internal drive this suggestion may be too inconvenient for most users. However, users working with Photoshop and other demanding programs can benefit from an external dual-drive eSATA striped RAID, achieving the same benefits, at least when “docked” (not traveling).
Avoid mixing data with system and applications
Avoid putting your data (images, spreadsheets, documents, music) on the same volume as your system, and preferably not even on the same physical drive as your system (eg a partition on the same drive as the system). It’s one thing for a hard drive to fail; it’s quite another to have both the system and your data gone simultaneously!
This means you need at least two hard drives to do it right, though you can partition one hard drive into two volumes as a half-way solution. This is an unfortunate situation for the MacBook Pro, iMac, etc, which can have only one internal hard drive, but there’s no excuse for bad hygiene with a Mac Pro.
By putting all your data on one data volume (I call my data volume ), you can backup just that drive (and perhaps your home directory too). See how I set up my Mac Pro.
The separation of system and data generally means better performance as well, since there is no contention between software and applications for access to the hard drive. Also, less total data is stored on each drive, so the fast part of the drive gets used.
Don’t move your entire home folder PERMALINK
Do not move your entire home folder to another drive. While this can be done, by doing so you’re generally setting yourself up for headaches down the line; much of what should be in your home folder are application preferences and support files. If you’ve followed the separation principle laid out here, then your home folder will be tiny anyway — mine is ~5GB.
Moving iTunes and iPhoto libraries PERMALINK
Both iTunes and iPhoto allow you to place your music/photo libraries anywhere you like. Indeed, iPhoto allows you to have more than one library. More than one iPhoto library is especially advised if you have a huge number of photos that can be grouped sensibly (eg work vs personal), because performance will generally be better with a smaller library.
To move your iPhoto library, first copy it to the desired location. Then start iPhoto holding down the Option key. When all is well, remove the original library— don’t get confused!
You can move your iTunes library also. iTunes will even do the job for you if you use its preferences. You can also have more than one iTunes library.
Moving the Apple Mail folder to your data volume PERMALINK Advanced Tip
This trick lets you move your Mail folder out of your home directory onto your data volume. I’ve used this technique for years so that I can forget about having to back up my home directory (default location for Apple Mail) and simply back up my one data volume: . The same trick can be used for any similarly irritating program that insists on storing its data in your home directory, rather than giving you a choice (a few programs are too brain-dead for this to work). Programs like iTunes let you choose where to put your music; use that option.
Your Apple Mail folder is in the folder of your home directory.
The trick requires starting Terminal. If that makes you uncomfortable, stop here! You are going to make a symbolic link.
0. Quit Apple Mail, and make a backup of your mail folder.
1. Copy the Mail folder to the top level of your data drive (or elsewhere, then modify step 3 appropriately).
2. Rename the original mail folder to Mail.old as an additional backup.
3. Start a Terminal window and type:
ln -s /Volumes/Master/Mail Library/Mail
This makes a symbolic link to the folder Mail on the volume (type the name of your volume, and use quotes around it if the volume name contains a space character). The resulting file Library/Mail is a tiny file that says “look over there on /Volumes/Master/Mail instead”.
From here on out Apple Mail won’t know the difference! Launch Apple Mail and verify that it worked. If you encounter problems, simply copy your backup back into place.
Plan for high performance — a RAID stripe PERMALINK
For demanding tasks like handling large files in Photoshop, you absolutely must plan on using striped RAID to raise disk I/O performance 2-6X faster than can be achieved with a single drive.
A “striped” RAID offers high performance because reads and writes are split across multiple hard drives. The performance of striping scales extremely well (almost linearly) up to ten hard drives or so with the right hardware. This means that a 2-drive stripe is twice as fast as a single drive, 3 drives is 3 times as fast, etc. The six (6) internal SATA ports on the Mac Pro scale almost linearly. Beware of port multiplication, a scourge to performance.
The disadvantage of striping is that if one drive fails (out of 2 or 3 or N drives), the striped volume and its data are history. This is one reason to pay a premium for “enterprise class” drives. However, regular backups are your only real protection against drive failures. More expensive hardware-based RAID systems can offer redundancy, but that’s more complicated and expensive and won’t be discussed here.
Barring an extreme situation, 4 fast hard drives offers more than ample performance for virtually any scenario, with 3 drives a nice compromise. Programs like Photoshop underutilize the performance of RAID in some cases (opening and saving files), but benefit greatly in other cases (scratch volume). However, backups and other operations (copying) are up to twice as fast with 4 drives as with two.
