Mac Pro 2.8 My Oh My...

[Jan Brittenson]

Jan:

I have no idea what you just wrote means, but is it safe to assume that if Apple sold me a Seagate 7200.10 drive originally, that if I put in a newer generation 7200.11 i will have that capability?

Yeah, I think so.

I used to work at Sun Microsystems, both with kernel group (although I'm a network stack guy) and later with the storage division with digital broadcasting and streaming systems - intended to drive storage sales. (The products were later sold off to Toshiba.) This was in the mid 90s, but we too shipped "crappy" old drives in our workstations, not because we wanted to immensely mark them up, but in part because each new model took forever to qualify, and in part because of volume commitments with the drive vendor. The two worked together - we'd sign up for volume commitments because we knew we wouldn't qualify something new too soon, and there was no point testing new hardware until we reached the end of the contract. I bet Apple goes through exactly the same.

That said, qualification wasn't always a slamdunk...

 

[etrigan63]

Seagate drives are the drives of choice over at 1 Infinite Loop.

 

[Sean_Reid]

Be aware Sean that adding a second CPU has its own issues. The first is the stepping of the CPU. Intel will make revisions to its microcode base and issue that as a new stepping of the same CPU. When you are setting up a dual processor system you want to make sure that the stepping is the same or at worst one step apart, otherwise you will run into compatibility issues. In the Windows world, a utility like CPU-Z can tell you the stepping level of your processor. I am not aware of such a tool in the Mac Universe.

Thanks Carlos. I'll keep that in mind if I ever add the other processor. Building windows computers I sometimes looked for specific processor steppings (just as I would have had I gone ahead with my plans to build an Asus/Kentfield machine). It won't be any time in near future though because if I really felt that I needed that second processor I would have gotten an 8-core. I'm still setting up the Mac Pro but I'm sure this one will fly already.

Some thoughts:

The drive mounting system is excellent, cushioned and quickly removeable (as its been in the Antec cases I've used).

I like the horizontal mounting of the hard drives because it should mean that heat from one drive does not rise up to another. I always direct cooled my internal drives with a 120 mm fan but the Mac Pro's in/out fans look promising. I filled the first three bays (stock drive plus two 500 GB RE2's) and have left the right-most bay (below the power supply and above the graphics card) empty.

Glad to have this particular forum right now. Thanks all for the suggestions, etc.

Cheers,

Sean

 

[Sean_Reid]

Ah Ha! I just got a little flashlight in there and I now see exactly what you mean, Jack and Guy. I do think that I could get that mounted without removing anything. Excellent tip guys! I had initially ruled that idea out because I didn't want to take the new computer apart. I'm going to order that Newer Tech cable kit and just send the PCI card back after it arrives. This is great.

Cheers,

Sean

Given this location, its surprising that the review I linked above doesn't at least suggest that these cables can be installed without removing the fan, etc. (if one is careful).

Cheers,

Sean

 

[Sean_Reid]

Keep the journal enabled, it protects against file system corruption and makes file system checks on boot really fast. It's a fixed-length (exactly one extent) circular transaction log. Metadata operations that require multiple accesses (like rebalancing the B* catalog or creating a file) get written to the journal as a transaction. When the transaction is finished it's committed - the journal entry is played and the real changes made. Transactions are designed so they can be replayed even if partially finished, so if the system gets power cycled in the middle of a transaction it can replay unfinished but committed journal entries when it starts up again - getting the file system to a consistent state. Data loss and such is still possible, but the file system won't be corrupted.

For this to really work (as in guaranteed consistency) it's important to use drives that implement the ATA FLUSH CACHE command. Otherwise the tail end of a transaction can sit in the drive cache! Needless to say, all drives sold by Apple implement this properly. (Some drives are buggy, or implement it as a no-op.)

I'm no programmer but, from what you say, it seems I "done good" following Jack's advice and formatting the new drives as extended journaled. Thanks Jack and Jan. I get the gist of what you, Jan, are saying, if not the specifics.

I hope my two new drives have the decency to flush when they're done but I don't know. I'll have to research some time. The RE2 drives, which are newer versions of those I've used before for Windows machines, are: WESTERN DIGITAL WD5000ABYS 500GB SATA 7200

Cheers,

Sean

 

[etrigan63]

Those drives should be just fine Sean. I just got my 1TB 7200.11 Seagate Barracuda which will be doing Time Machine duty in my Mac Pro when it arrives. Speaking of upgrading Mac Pros, I had an interesting discussion with some ATI engineers the other day. Seems that the proliferation of Mac-compatible video cards is assured for this year thanks to Microsoft. When Service Pack 1 of Vista is released, Microsoft will finally provide support for motherboards that are UEFI (Universal Extended Firmware Interface) based like the Mac Pro. HP has already stated that they are going in this direction and other manufacturers will follow suit thereafter. So what bearing does this have on video cards for the Mac Pro? Plenty. For a video card to work in a Mac Pro you need the card to be activated by the bootstrap code in the UEFI interface. Current PC's still use BIOS and since there was no Windows support for UEFI no one rushed out to support it (except for Apple who has to be ahead of the curve). Ergo, with UEFI motherboards proliferating, there will be a similar proliferation of UEFI compliant video cards and the field for alternative Mac Pro video cards will expand greatly.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

I just bought all the new Seagates .11 drives which are 7200 32mm, 3 1tb and 2 500gb. Very very nice hard drives

 

[Sean_Reid]

Those drives should be just fine Sean. I just got my 1TB 7200.11 Seagate Barracuda which will be doing Time Machine duty in my Mac Pro when it arrives. Speaking of upgrading Mac Pros, I had an interesting discussion with some ATI engineers the other day. Seems that the proliferation of Mac-compatible video cards is assured for this year thanks to Microsoft. When Service Pack 1 of Vista is released, Microsoft will finally provide support for motherboards that are UEFI (Universal Extended Firmware Interface) based like the Mac Pro. HP has already stated that they are going in this direction and other manufacturers will follow suit thereafter. So what bearing does this have on video cards for the Mac Pro? Plenty. For a video card to work in a Mac Pro you need the card to be activated by the bootstrap code in the UEFI interface. Current PC's still use BIOS and since there was no Windows support for UEFI no one rushed out to support it (except for Apple who has to be ahead of the curve). Ergo, with UEFI motherboards proliferating, there will be a similar proliferation of UEFI compliant video cards and the field for alternative Mac Pro video cards will expand greatly.

Cool, thanks for that info.

Cheers,

Sean

 

[Lars]

Sean,
In defense of Vista - I know you already made the switch, but I find that Vista x64 hums along quite nicely and where I need XP for compatibility I can always set up a dual-boot, like when using my vintage 1991 drum scanner over SCSI. Getting good drivers for an OS is of course important, so rebuilding a Vista x64 workstation using older hardware would perhaps not have been a great idea anyway. I find Vista x64 to be rock solid on my desktop and laptop, now that I have good and stable drivers for my hardware - my next reboot will probably be when SP1 arrives. My only significant gripe with Vista is that it's a bit of a memory hog.
Lars

 

[etrigan63]

Vista's appetite for memory is by design. Vista is constantly updating internal search indexes, optimizing drive caches, and a whole host of functions behind the scenes. Vista x64 is a very solid platform assuming you have supported hardware. I ought to know. I run PlanetAMD64.com and have been 64-bit for a very very long time.

My desire to go to the Mac is to prevent me from messing with my workstation. I receive hardware to test all of the time and I am always tempted to stuff the latest & greatest on my personal workstation (who wouldn't?). I want a machine that won't become the target for my wanton desire for compute power. Mac Pro 2.8 fits the bill quite nicely. Aside from a memory upgrade, future video card and an additional hard drive (all trivial upgrades), I don't see myself stripping this box down and rebuilding it like I do with my PC workstation.

 

[Sean_Reid]

Sean,
In defense of Vista - I know you already made the switch, but I find that Vista x64 hums along quite nicely and where I need XP for compatibility I can always set up a dual-boot, like when using my vintage 1991 drum scanner over SCSI. Getting good drivers for an OS is of course important, so rebuilding a Vista x64 workstation using older hardware would perhaps not have been a great idea anyway. I find Vista x64 to be rock solid on my desktop and laptop, now that I have good and stable drivers for my hardware - my next reboot will probably be when SP1 arrives. My only significant gripe with Vista is that it's a bit of a memory hog.
Lars

Hi Lars,

The thing is that I do *so much* work (of various kinds) on my primary computer that I need to be able to get to various programs, devices, etc. without rebooting. XP64 or Vista 64 would have been unworkable for me because of limitations with software, certain printers I have, certain scanners, etc. Much of what I need to do every day cannot, yet, be done with Windows 64-bit OS (however wonderful it might be). It would be one of those things that was nice in concept but lousy in practice. I've got to be able to multi-task all kinds of writing and image tasks with as little fuss as possible.

Cheers,

Sean

 

[Lars]

Sean,
Got it. Total mess.
Lars
(Personally I use at least four computers to help me turn my life into chaos )

 

[etrigan63]

As I had said "if you have supported hardware". Legacy and extra-heterogeneous hardware mixes will not do well in any 64-bit Windows environment. This is due to the 64-bit "signed" driver requirement. Mac OS X can use 32-bit drivers in "legacy" mode transparently.

 

[etrigan63]

Well I am happy to report that I am picking up my Mac Pro tomorrow. I have already acquired an additional 2GB of RAM from OWC (bringing the total to 4GB) and a 1TB Seagate drive for Time Machine. SuperTalent was kind enough to send a review sample of their new Mac memory so I will be testing that shortly as well. This is going to be a lot of fun!

 

[Jack]

Congrats Carlos, keep us posted!

 

[etrigan63]

I have picked up my Mac Pro and I have to report that the system is quite snappy (8GB of RAM sure helps). Just getting my "sea legs" with it, setting up software and such. I used Outlook2Mac to migrate my e-mail files over. Worked pretty well except that I had nested folders in Outlook and it converted them to flat files. Have to edit the folder names now so they make more sense. Tedious, but nowhere near difficult.

Not too crazy about the Apple Keyboard. Will probably swap it out for something a bit more ergonomic. Rumor has it that Apple will be developing a keyboard similar to Art Lebedev's Optimus Maximus. If you haven't heard of that you need to check it out here.

 

[etrigan63]

Well I just started processing images using Aperture 2 and it does take some getting used to. Once you get the hang of it, the workflow is pretty smooth. Here is a sample B&W conversion for your viewing pleasure: