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New Mac Pro

mwalker

Subscriber Member
My IT guru told me that if I load Win XP on a separate bootable partition on my drive (aka Bootcamp), it behaves exactly as a PC, albeit with a few extra and one or two missing keys on the keyboard ;)

The other option is to run Fusion (or Parallels) on Leopard, and then run XP virtually through that -- however, I understand this option is where you can run into driver conflicts.

Cheers,
yes that is correct but still squirrely. Autodesk said maybe in the near future.
 

MrSlezak

New member
In my opinion, the hardest part of running Windows on Apple’s hardware is getting drivers for Apple’s hardware. My understanding is Apple doesn't support x64 support for Bootcamp, but not everyone views that as an issue.
 

sandymc

New member
My experience of Windows XP and bootcamp on a MacBook Pro has been very good. Rock solid, no issues at all (other than the different keyboard). Parallels was very clever, very convenient, but not quite 100% solid; e.g., it managed to screw up XP's recognition of files, so Office files didn't show as Office files. I deleted it at the end of the trail period....

Sandy
 
S

Sean_Reid

Guest
Hiya Sandy,

Have you tried Fusion? I hear good things.

Cheers,

Sean
 

sandymc

New member
Sean,

Haven't tried Fusion, but I do use their PC/Linux based products (server and player), and I've always had good results with those.

Sandy
 

PeterA

Well-known member
Fusion works very well - so well I have a it runnning my work network whilst I have my mac stuff running int he background - no hitches except for key board differences..
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
New Mac Pro update...

Here's some interesting info for anybody contemplating the base system --- pay special attention to the drive comment. FWIW mine should arrive tomorrow and I ordered the 500G upgrade. It appears the base 320 drive may be a Seagate 7200.10 with 16MB buffer (or possibly even an older .9 with an 8MB buffer). I'm hoping the 500 upgrade is the latest 7200.11 or .ES with 32MB buffer which would explain some of the rather expensive upgrade cost since the .11/ES is a lot faster than the .10. I'll be opening mine up and checking before I even fire it up, so stay tuned... If it's a .10, I'll be pissed.

Here's the link: http://www.macworld.com/article/131538/2008/01/macprobench.html
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Hey bud , issue is they will throw anything available on the line in it. I would consider this that backup OS drive or some non essential part of the total package maybe even scratch.

I need to look at the new sata 3 drives myself
 

etrigan63

Active member
My IT guru told me that if I load Win XP on a separate bootable partition on my drive (aka Bootcamp), it behaves exactly as a PC, albeit with a few extra and one or two missing keys on the keyboard ;)

The other option is to run Fusion (or Parallels) on Leopard, and then run XP virtually through that -- however, I understand this option is where you can run into driver conflicts.

Cheers,
The problem with running a program like Autocad under a VM is access to the video hardware. Autocad makes special calls to the video card to access the GPU. In a virtualized environment, a generic video driver is used instead of the actual hardware. How much 3D/2D acceleration the virtualized driver provides varies from virtual system to virtual system but you never get the same level of hardware access you do under Bootcamp. Unless your Autocad needs are very, very light (like viewing CAD files and not editing them) I would recommend using Bootcamp and a proper Windows environment to host AutoCAD.
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
New Mac Pro update...

I'll be opening mine up and checking before I even fire it up, so stay tuned... If it's a .10, I'll be pissed.
I finalized and placed my order today. It will have two 500g drives installed so I would be interested in what you find out. Since mine won't be shipping until late Feb. (because of the video card), there would be time to tweak the order. Thanks.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
If you google 7200.11 you'll find a few benchmark tests that show the rather significant performance gains with the .11's (same as ES in the enterprise line). Anyway, the .11 apparently can maintain around 90MB/s sustained write times! Guy, this is significantly faster than your 10,000 RPM raptors. Burst speed is almost as good as the 10K raptor, but IMO the bigger advantage is these drives are a lot quieter than your Raptors and run almost 10 degrees cooler, so a lot less box heat (and hence fan noise).
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
TRSmith: Well my new MacPro arrived, and the short version is I'm mildly pissed...

THe 500G drive is a Seagate 7200.10 with 16MB buffer. I am moving the OS to the faster 7200.11 32MB buffer drive as I write this from my notebook. I will use the 7200.10 for Time Machine and get another 7200.11 for scratch and critical back-up. Heck, I may even stripe a pair of them, one partition for scratch and the other for faster reads and writes of current working images...

On the plus side, the 7200.10 is no slouch, easily faster than any of my earlier SATA drives, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. Also, I read several online reports claiming the 7200.10 was quite a bit noisier than the 7200.11 -- it is a tiny bit noisier on the head seek clicks, but nothing even remotely offensive. So if you're not anal like i am, you may be happy with the 7200.10's --- just be aware they are on the floor at my local Fry's right now for $99 each, so I would not pay Apple's price for one...
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
Jack: Thanks for the info on the drive. I can understand being somewhat disappointed that it's not what you hoped. I'm not sure I would necessarily notice the difference unless it was obviously slower than what I'm running now. Still... it is nice to have the best when you pay top dollar for something.

Since I made my purchase through my business account manager and ordered the box with 2 of the 500s in it, it might be worth calling him and asking if the elevens are even an option from Apple.

Aside from the drive, is it behaving/performing as you expected?
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Aside from the drive, is it behaving/performing as you expected?
Too early to tell --- it didn't arrive until late this afternoon, so I only had a few hours to mess with it. Bottom line is I partitioned the .11 to 200/300 and put the OS on the faster 200G end of the newer drive. This leaves 300g for misc data on the slower portion of the platters. I then migrated all my settings from my MBP over to the new Mac Pro, and all went smoothly. Then I erased to oem .10 drive and set it up as my dedicated Time Machine drive. It was writing to Time Machine as I left.

Tomorrow I'll be adding the external eSATA extender from the extra two SATA ports on the MB and figuring out the rest of my drive strategy. I am considering striping two more of the .11 drives for faster reads and writes on my current image files, of course mirrored to an external for redundant back-up. My RAM should be here on Thursday, so that's when I'm going to load it up on processes and see if anything breaks.

FWIW I did pull the cover and feel each drive after an extended read off the .10 and write to the .11. The .10 felt pretty darn cool --- just warm to the touch --- yet I had expected it to be much warmer after reading some online reports about heat. Chalk up another plus for the .10. However, the real surprise was when I touched the .11 --- it was barely warmer than room temp, so it really does run cool! In either case, neither drive heated up to the point where the fans kicked on high.

Oh, here's a 10 page review of some drives, including a 1TB .11 and 500G .10 --- take it with a grain of salt unless the actual tests replicate things you do, but the sustained read and write times are what got my attention --- note that the seagate ES2 is the same as a .11, while ES is a .10 : http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0,2

The hard fact is, Hitachi 1TB DESKSTAR continues to be the drive to beat on most performance fronts, while the WD 1TB GREEN is Queen of quiet, low power consumption and low heat.

Conclusion: If money isn't a concern, stripe (RAID0) a pair of Hitachi 1TB DESKSTARS for image read write, and back them up to a 1TB WD Green in an external enclosure. Then stripe another pair of Hitachis and partition the top 200G off for OS and use the rest as expensive (but fast) back-up... Those 5 drives and an external enclosure will cost you about $1500 at today's prices. Personally, I'll just live with the slightly slower read and writes and store my images on a single drive, mirrored (RAID1) to a back-up :)

Cheers,
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Yes, I found yet another report showing the Seagate on top in comparing Hitachi, WD and Seagate 1TB drives, in conflict with the report above, though it wa scomparing a 500G drvie to the Hitachi 1TB drive. At least this one is all 1TB drives: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2206630,00.asp

It appears ANY of these newer 1TB drives are pretty impressive performers. However, since Fry's just put the Seagate 1TB's on the floor at $269...

Bottom line is I have the WD inside my machine now and I can't hear it at all. It's definitely a bit slower than the others, but as the article above says, it's kind of the Prius of hard drives; I may suffer with the lesser performance for no heat and no noise :)
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
UPDATE on the the Seagate 7200.10 drive:

I installed that yesterday as my Time Machine drive. I noticed today as it "updates" on the hour, I can hear this drive. It isn't that the drive is particularly noisy, in fact it isn't very noisy at all. The issue is that the rest of the drives are virtually silent, so even the soft clicking noise the .10 drive makes catches your attention.

FWIW,
 

Lars

Active member
I like my harddrives noisy, let's me know they are working hard :)

The Samsung F1 is fastest on sustained throughput, doesn't mean it's the best allround performer. Important for scratch disk - but who needs a 1TB scratch disk?

It'll be a few years before I can get myself to trust Seagate again, I've had a few 120GB laptop drives fail (found out later that there was a recall) plus the current spectacle that I am trying to recover from. Seagate just seems to fail often. But there is of course a lot of variation, all manufacturers have their good and bad runs.

The best drives in my experience have been Hitachi/IBM TravelStar laptop drives. Never ever a problem. Fujitsu laptop drives are also impressive, they run very cool.
 
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