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roberto1979 Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #1 · building the fastest MAC PRO So I was reading on here a couple of weeks ago about a Mac Pro and how cheap 8gs of RAM was, and then seeing some pretty decent deals on refurbs got me curious about building a kick *ss Mac system. What's the best configuration of RAM and HD's? I want to price it all out, and if it works, I'll probably build one up. May 03, 2008 at 12:22 AM

butchM Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #2 · building the fastest MAC PRO http://eshop.macsales.com/ May 03, 2008 at 01:28 AM

Jonathan H Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #3 · building the fastest MAC PRO It's very easy to build as you go. I bought a base Mac Pro (2..66 Quad Core) and 4 GB of RAM from OWC. Later that month I put in another 300Gb drive (Seagate 7200.11 - faster than the 10K raptors in some respects). I'm still recovering from my purchase of a 6x8 Wacom and a 5D this month but plan on putting in another 500GB seagate drive and another 4GB of ram once finances allow. May 04, 2008 at 02:57 AM

annayu Online Image Upload: Off p.1 #4 · building the fastest MAC PRO 1TB drives are not so expensive anymore, but they'll probably get even cheaper in the future so I would only buy what is necessary for today. May 04, 2008 at 03:32 AM

roberto1979 Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #5 · building the fastest MAC PRO Well I just bought a refurbished 3.0 ghz dual quad core. I'm just curious what hard drives to use, what sizes, and how to allocate them. I'll probably buy 4-8 gigs of RAM as well. May 04, 2008 at 04:39 AM

SoundHound Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #6 · building the fastest MAC PRO If you buy new you will get an underside drive. After that you can buy 2/3 750Gb drives (750s are the sweet spot for $/Mb now-the 1Tb will come later). You can run two of these drives in RAID 0 (or Mirror) to protect data. That leaves the smaller/OEM drive for scratch/utility. Leave money for at least two monitors (I run 5) to multiply the utility of your new system. The standard graphics card runs two monitors. If you want 3/4 buy another card for less than $150. May 04, 2008 at 05:18 AM

roberto1979 Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #7 · building the fastest MAC PRO I don't know what you mean by underside drive. This is not the newest model. $800 for the RAID controller seems excessive, so I doubt I'll be getting that. I already have dual monitors, so those aren't an issue. May 04, 2008 at 05:22 AM

Jonathan H Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #8 · building the fastest MAC PRO You can RAID your drives right from Disk Utility. It's a software solution, not quite as fast as a hardware controller, but still good, and no slower than a single drive on its own. Regarding drive allocation: I have the original 250GB drive as my boot drive with all my applications/documents/music. My 2nd internal drive houses my Lightroom catalog and the archive of all the RAW's I've ever shot. I'm currently sending all my LR exports (files ready for clients, low res jpg proofs and high-res tiff's or album layout psd's) to my main boot drive, but those will move to my 3rd drive, coming soon. My Music, Documents, and Movies folders (about 100GB combined, mostly music) will also be moved to this 3rd drive, keeping my boot drive for the OS and applications alone. Personally, I never found the need to RAID anything... I just do nightly mirrors of my boot drive to an external FW800 drive using SuperDuper, best backup utility on the market for Mac, hands down. I also will run a mirror if I make any OS updates or changes, once I've tested for system stability. I also have a FW800 drive that gets backed up every 2 weeks or so and stored off site. My image archive drive is mirrored to an external USB drive whenever I add images, and backed up once a week to Amazon's S3 server. Once a month or so I'll do an overnight upload of a sparse image of my entire boot drive to S3. Whenever they're not actively in use, all my external drives sit in a fireproof safe, never on my desk. Even if a drive totally dies, I only stand to lose 24 hours of work at the very most. Restoring is as easy as popping a new drive in, and mirroring my external clone over. No RAID headaches, no extra costs for multiple drives, and triple redundant in every aspect. May 04, 2008 at 06:11 AM

SoundHound Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #9 · building the fastest MAC PRO If you buy new you will get an smallish drive as standard. After that you can buy 2/3 750Gb drives (750s are the sweet spot for $/Mb now-1Tb will come later). You can run two of these drives in RAID 0 (or Mirror) to protect data. That leaves the smaller/OEM drive for scratch/utility. Leave money for at least two monitors (I run 5) to multiply the utility of your new system. The standard graphics card runs two monitors. If you want 3/4 buy another card for less than $150. May 04, 2008 at 02:31 PM

KFG1 Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #10 · building the fastest MAC PRO Interesting how we do things so differently? My newest MacPro is a dual Quad Core 3.0GHZ, I put in 4 Seagate 500GB drives and run multiple 1TB external drives for back up, that I share with my other MacPro & G5 PowerMac, all the drives came from OWC. I then added 16GB of ram that I bought from Crucial, the 4GB kit is a great deal on reliable ram. I prefer to use a single monitor, but each one of my systems has a dedicated monitor. May 05, 2008 at 03:18 AM

CTYankee Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #11 · building the fastest MAC PRO Transintl.com has the RAM you need for the best price. 8GB is good, sell the 2GB you get with it. 4 DIMMS (2 on each riser) is the fastest configuration. Granted, not much faster than 6 or 8 DIMMs, but a bit. Hard drives. Newegg has the new Western Digital 640gb drives that are 320GB per platter. This density is second only to the Toshiba F1 drives. Right now density is what determines speed, not rpms. These are as fast or faster than a much smaller Raptor. www.barefeats.com for details and coupon on this drive. I would use one as your system, another as you scratch, system backup (its OK that your backup disk has less space since you should not exceed 60% capacity of any disk, otherwise performance begins to drop and can be significant). A RAID 0 is VERY fast. So anything running on a RAID 0 with 2 WD640GB drives will be about as fast as you can get...system, scratch, data. Though 1.2TB for a system is a bit much. Ditto for scratch. But, hey, at $110 a pop these drives are not that expensive. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218&Tpk=WD6400AAKS Then an external FW800 (eSATA is faster, but is not hot swappable....you have to reboot.) for external backup that is kept safe (fire safe for me). Edited on May 05, 2008 at 03:55 AM May 05, 2008 at 03:54 AM

SoundHound Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #12 · building the fastest MAC PRO The point is that aftermarket HDs, monitors and RAM are cheaper than Apple's OEM stuff. I run a Thecus 5 HD RAID data array. A mechanical failure of a premium HD-it happened to me so it could happen to you. That why I switched from RAID 5 to RAID 6 (with two "parity" drives). That means that any two drives can fail and the other 3 will preserve the data. Upon hot swapping replacement drives the RAID will rebuild it's array while still functioning (slower). Practically, this means that when one drive fails you have the protection of another (parity) drive during the time you take to replace the failed drive. You also have room for 4 internal drives with less RAID options inside the MacPro. Crucial RAM is Mac RAM since Crucial is the direct marketing company owned by Micron who OEM's Apples' RAM. Because 4 Gb "sticks" of RAM are now available the older 2X Dual (4X) motherboards have room for 32Gb of RAM. I don't know how, present, 32 bit programs could ever use 16Gb much less 32Gb. Unfortunately, when CS4 is released the Mac version will not be 64 bit due to a "language" incompatibility of Adobe's code. May 07, 2008 at 05:17 AM

roberto1979 Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #13 · building the fastest MAC PRO CTYankee wrote: 8GB is good, sell the 2GB you get with it. 4 DIMMS (2 on each riser) is the fastest configuration. Granted, not much faster than 6 or 8 DIMMs, but a bit. Mind explaining that? Do you mean 4, 2gb sticks? Any reason to not use 10gb? CTYankee wrote:I would use one as your system, another as you scratch, system backup (its OK that your backup disk has less space since you should not exceed 60% capacity of any disk, otherwise performance begins to drop and can be significant). A RAID 0 is VERY fast. So anything running on a RAID 0 with 2 WD640GB drives will be about as fast as you can get...system, scratch, data. Can you explain that in a bit more detail as well? I've read some about RAID, but don't completely understand it. Would I need 4 of those hard drives? 4x$110, and $282 for the RAM is doable, as the total cost would put me around $3100 for what seems to be a screaming system. May 09, 2008 at 03:21 AM

CTYankee Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #14 · building the fastest MAC PRO OK...RAM. There is room for 8 DIMMS. However tests show that all things being equal....4 DIMMS is ideal. Test were done using 8 1GB sticks vs 4 2GB sticks vs 2 2GB/4 1GB sticks. So 3 different configurations of 8GB of RAM. The 4x2GB configuration was fastest, followed (very closely) by the 8x1GB and last was the 2x2/1GB. I forget all the technical details on why the 4 DIMMS is faster (I think it has an effect on latency)...but it is...but barely. The interested part is when you look at several DIMMS of different sizes. What happens is the system switches from Quad channel to dual channel memory mode. This happens if you mix RAM sizes (1GB on one riser, 2GB on another). For most apps its not a big deal. At times it can effect performance. That is why 10GB of RAM can be slower than 8GB. Going with 10GB (4x2GB + 2x1GB) will put the RAM into dual channel mode. Its rare to need more than 6GB of RAM so the benefit of 10GB will rarely be exploited. However the RAM will always be in dual channel mode...thus not working at its fullest potential all the time. RAID 0 uses 2 drives to write data. So it almost doubles the speed of writing and accessing data. Very helpful for drives that are often read or written to...like system disks or scratch disk. Disk Utility can create a RAID 0 volume for you. Just be warned...one drive failing means ALL data is lost. So that is why its not a great idea for a system drive unless you have a very good backup scheme in place. Unless you are working with HUGE files in PS, the ultra fast scratch won't be a huge help either. With OSX, RAID0 volumes can't be partitioned. Thats something that does limit what you can do as it means your disk can only be used as one volume and one function (ie you can't have a scratch and Time Machine). Regardless of what you do, the Mac Pro will be fast. Its not like misconfiguring it will make it run slow. Chances are you will rarely think...this is sluggish. The way I would configure a fast, but practical Mac Pro would be: 8GB RAM, 2 2GB DIMMS on each riser (so each will have 2 DIMMS and 2 empty slots) WD6400AAKS system drive WD6400AAKS Scratch drive (with a 500GB partition for Time Machine on this volume) WD6400AAKS Photos drive...I like having my applications, scratch and photos on separate disks. May 09, 2008 at 06:28 AM

roberto1979 Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #15 · building the fastest MAC PRO Thanks a lot. That all made perfect sense. I built a new PC last year, and while it was a massive improvement over my older PC, I do shoot quite a few panos, some ending up with up to 20 pictures stitched together. These end up being massive files, and after just a few layers I was getting "out of memory" errors, so that's what I'm hoping to avoid with this new setup. I know that it will slow down performance some, but I just want to avoid getting into processing a file for 2hrs, and then the whole thing shut down on me. May 09, 2008 at 01:30 PM

Jonathan H Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #16 · building the fastest MAC PRO Sorry to dredge this up from the past. Given enough space for data, can a single external Time Machine volume back up 3 different internal drives? May 16, 2008 at 07:19 AM

PShizzy Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #17 · building the fastest MAC PRO I bought a base Mac Pro the other day. Dual 2.8 Quad Cores. Then I bought 12Gigs of ram (2GBx6 sticks) and 2 750GB drives. It's nice Max Simbron PShizzy: The Blog, is Alive! at www.PShizzy.com May 16, 2008 at 07:33 AM

Jeff Phillips Offline Image Upload: Off p.1 #18 · building the fastest MAC PRO Jonathan H: Given the size of the three drives are small enough - yes. Example: a 1 TB Time Capsule would have no problem backing up 3 250gb drives. Or even a 500gb and 2 250gb. I hear you can add an external drive to Time Capsule thru the usb port on the device but I don't know first hand about that... May 16, 2008 at 11:57 AM

Richard Nye Offline Buy and Sell: On p.1 #19 · building the fastest MAC PRO I just bought a Mac Pro with 2 2.8GHz quad core processors, 8GB RAM, and I installed 2 WD6400AAKS hard drives in addition to the supplied 320GB drive. My intention was to use the original 320GB drive for applications and the OS while setting up the 2 640GB drives as RAID Mirror drives for data (mostly photos, but music and documents too). My question is how do I do that? Should I copy the User folder (I have 2 users plus "Shared") over to the RAID set? Never mind. I got it figured out. Edited on May 17, 2008 at 05:28 AM May 17, 2008 at 02:35 AM

GSteve Offline Image Upload: On p.1 #20 · building the fastest MAC PRO Richard, I've just ordered the same setup and I'm sure that I'll have the same situation once I start to assemble everything, so would you mind sharing the answer? Thanks. May 17, 2008 at 10:05 AM

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