New Mac Pro and need help

[Noel_Carboni]

Misconception:

With a Raid 0 configuration for the operating system, speed gained is negated by the loss of hard drive space.

Not true. Raid 0 stripes the data and the overall space is the sum total of the drives. Think of a 2 drive Raid 0 as "even sectors go to one drive, odd to the other". Effectively doubles the speed of the disks and evens out the seek time delays.

Doubling the speed is significant.

By the way, as an experiment (remember I'm on PC rather than Mac), I put the Photoshop scratch area on the same (fast Raid 0) partition as the OS swap file. Photoshop performance really went to hell any time Photoshop went into virtual storage. With Photoshop's scratch area on my other, much slower single drive, going virtual still slows the system some, but it is actually quite usable (opposed to "walk away in disgust" with the former approach).

I love keeping a really deep history and working on huge files.

-Noel

[Jerry Skrocki]

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

Misconception:
Not true. Raid 0 stripes the data and the overall space is the sum total of the drives. Think of a 2 drive Raid 0 as "even sectors go to one drive, odd to the other". Effectively doubles the speed of the disks and evens out the seek time delays.

Doubling the speed is significant.

By the way, as an experiment (remember I'm on PC rather than Mac), I put the Photoshop scratch area on the same (fast Raid 0) partition as the OS swap file. Photoshop performance really went to hell any time Photoshop went into virtual storage. With Photoshop's scratch area on my other, much slower single drive, going virtual still slows the system some, but it is actually quite usable (opposed to "walk away in disgust" with the former approach).

I love keeping a really deep history and working on huge files.

-Noel

I stand corrected. My mind was stuck on a Raid 1 configuration!

I was trying to emphasize the optimal configuration of the 4 drive bays in the Mac Pro. While Raid 0 would provide a faster solution, it does come at a cost. It decreases the number of available drive configurations from 4 to 2. If bays 1&2 are used for the OS in a Raid 0 configuration, bays 3&4 would have to be used as Raid 0 scratch disk in order to utilize the speed increase of a raid solution. It is important for the MacPro to have a dedicated Time Machine drive as well for back up and an internal drive is the optimal solution for speed of data transfer preventing bottlenecking. A separate hard drive for images (in my opinion) is also necessary.

I feel the MacPro provides enough hardware speed without a raid setup for image editing.

Jerry

[Noel_Carboni]

Perhaps an external firewire or USB drive (e.g., WD My Book) might be the best solution for Time Machine? I don't know how intensive the I/O operations will be.

-Noel

[Jerry Skrocki]

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

Perhaps an external firewire or USB drive (e.g., WD My Book) might be the best solution for Time Machine? I don't know how intensive the I/O operations will be.

-Noel

That's exactly what I thought when Leopard was first released. I bought a 500 gig WD My Book with Firewire 400 connection. This bogged down by system, constantly getting beach-balls while Time Machine did it's thing. I eventually ended up with a corrupted Time Machine backup, chalking it up to the slower connection speed (compared to that of the internal drives).
Switching Time Machine to an internal drive made a world of difference.
Time Machine backs up hourly for 24 hours, daily for 1 month and weekly until your drive is full. It is very I/O intensive. Although it is only saving files that have changed with each hourly backup, if that backup occurs while you are in the middle of a memory intensive image edit, you don't want unexpected results.

Many people do not like Time Machine because it is constantly working in the background, but configured correctly it is a great feature. What other back up solution allows you to restore just 1 file if you so choose? Most back up software require an entire system restore.

Jerry

Another alternative that I am currently researching is an esata card with external drive enclosures.

Here's a vote for esata for a cheap, yet fast backup solution. We have an esata card in one of our systems with two external cases attached. Much better than any other external solution I've found for the average consumer.

I think we only paid about $24 for the cases at microcenter and I forget how much the card was. You just pop some standard oem sata II 300 drives in and you're good to go. Can't really tell the difference between internal and external speeds with this method.

When one of your cheap 1gb or 500gb drives fills up. Simply store it in the cheap case and pop on another. Or get another card and just keep adding to your always online setup.

One caution, drives over 500gb in a non-vented external case can heat up quickly and potentially reduce drive longevitiy.

This was all pc based. Not sure of what the esata options are for the mac folks.

We went the Raid 0 route on a build a few years ago. It is still working fine and does improve peformance. However, with our most recent build I just skipped raid all together and went with a raptor drive as the main system drive.

[perrycho]

Thanks guys and you are doing a great job in confusing me, time machine??, and all those computer and apple jargon

On the serious side, I will read over all the info here and make an informed decision in due course.

I guess I have to decided on redundancy versus Backup.

My core issue is really protection of Hard Drive failure so either I have a good backup system or make sure my drives are mirrored.

I will go and talk to the guys at apple and see what they think as well.

Once again thank you all

Perry