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Specs for a new Mac Pro

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Jack, Totally agree I want the fastest machine for the buck.
Mitchell
It's the 8-core 2.93 :D However, I would probably be as happy with the 8x2.66. Personally, I would not bother with the 2.26 if I wanted speed...
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Junky. Can we take the speed needle out now. LOL

I should talk. I went for the fastest processor and reason being is you can't upgrade this later nor the cores. Ram and Hard drives can come anytime the need arises. That's the buy decision not always makes the most sense at first but as you build the system later you will see the gains with Ram , Striped drives , Raid 0 and scratch. At some point in time you will max it out but that will take awhile. I finally had my MacPro as fast as i could get it without getting to stupid with 32gb of ram. 12gb did great on my box after that you are picking up small percentage points on speed. Also you can look at SSD drives today or down the road as prices drop. I have SSD drives in my laptop and love them but you have to watch the write times on them plus there pricy right now.
 

cjl

Member
As a replacement for my 4.5 year old PowerMac I just ordered a new Mac Pro with the dual quads and 8GB of ram (on the assumption -- maybe mistaken after reading this thread -- that PS4 and Lightroom won't be able to use much more RAM than that effectively and I'll be able to upgrade at lower costs later on). I have Apple installing two 640GB drives, one for the System and the other for Apps. What would you speed demons recommend for the PS and LR caches? A couple of small hard disks in a striped RAID? Would bigger drivers be better for a RAID (even though it is a waste for cache files)? Or should I look for a compatible SSD?
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
For posterity, I have copied this update over from my DROBO thread in the Gear Garage as it explains my entire drive arrangement:

I now have 6 SATA2 drives in my Mac Pro using this device: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=158. I have my OS residing on a striped pair of WD 640G Caviar Black drives. These drives are screaming fast for 7200 RPM drives and RAID very well, but they do have a slight amount of head seek noise, soft but audible in my Mac Pro -- and they give me a huge, fast desktop for temporary image storage. I then have 4 of the WD 640G Caviar Blue drives in RAID-0 mounted in the main bays. These are perhaps a tad slower on random I/O operation than the Blacks, but are virtually silent -- and in a 4-drive RAID-0 they are VERY fast. On that array, I have a thin outer partition (4x30G) for uber-fast CS scratch and a large 4x450G, or 1.8G partition for Image storage. I then left a small 115G partition at the very end of each drive non-RAID, and use these to store back-up and bootable copies of my OS and other miscellany.

Note that if I were building this today, I would use 4 of the 1TB WD Caviar Black drives in the 4-drive array, but am in no hurry to replace the 640's yet. I would keep the pair of WD 640 blacks as the OS stripe.

FWIW, I am currently running 24G of OWC RAM: 4x4G sticks plus 4x2G sticks.

My machine as set above, is pretty snappy in its performance.

Cheers,
 

cjl

Member
Jack, I greatly appreciate your advice. Wish I had six drives to RAID! But two questions. I would have thought that having the PS cache and image storage on two partitions of the same RAID array would be counterproductive. Wouldn't read and write operations be even faster if the cache was on separate physical drives (RAID or not)? Maybe the speed improvement renders that point moot, but just wondering. Also, do you have any qualms about putting image storage on a RAID array in terms of possible individual drive failure? Thanks again, Chris
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Jack, I greatly appreciate your advice. Wish I had six drives to RAID! But two questions. I would have thought that having the PS cache and image storage on two partitions of the same RAID array would be counterproductive. Wouldn't read and write operations be even faster if the cache was on separate physical drives (RAID or not)? Maybe the speed improvement renders that point moot, but just wondering. Also, do you have any qualms about putting image storage on a RAID array in terms of possible individual drive failure? Thanks again, Chris
It's a fair question Chris:

If you think about what's going on when you work in CS4 when you tag the scratch, it is usually a one image at a time workflow unless you are batching. Or you may be multi-tasking. So...

1) With one image at a time, you read the file from the big partition to open it, once opened, all the reading is done. Now you work on it, ultimately adding a bunch of layers and the operation start to tag the scratch disk -- no worries because nothing else is tagging the array at that point in time. When you are ready to save it, the scratch is all done so the file write isn't interrupted.

2) If you are batching in CS4, there may be a slow down as you read, process and write, but it is still a linear operation in CS4 -- meaning the file is read, the actions are performed, then the file is written -- so I suspect the net negative effect is small since there will be little I/O overlap.

3) Now to multi-tasking. Say you have your raw converter busy batch processing say 200 images from a shoot while you are tweaking the large file per #1 above. Here the RC is reading, converting and writing back to the array which is heavy I/O with a pause during the processing, all going on while scratch needs to tag the outer rim. Probably here I am being penalized, but the reality is the array is still so fast my performance maybe drops to at worse what I would get with a single dedicated scratch disk.

As re image storage on a RAID array:

RAID is for performance only and definitely -- as I have said earlier in this thread and all over the DROBO thread -- ANY RAID array needs to be backed up. In my case, that fast working image array is backed up onsite to a DROBO, which is then further backed up to single drives stored offsite. So even if my RAID goes down while I'm working, I can continue to work off my DROBO. If the DROBO and the RAID should go down together, then I'd need to leave my chair... I'd go buy a bunch of new drives, go get the single drives out of storage, then I'd re-build the arrays and very carefully copy the data back over from the singles.

Hope that clarifies,
 

Mitchell

New member
Hi,

Thanks everyone, especially Jack. I finally took the plunge and ordered an 8 core, the slowest, with memory and drives form OWC . It won't be a "little deuce coupe," but I'm sure plenty for me, now and in the future.

Best,

Mitchell
 
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