New Mac Pro and need help

[perrycho]

OK, I am finally switching from PC to Apple. I will be getting a Mac Pro soon and I need help with regards to how I organise my hard disk setup. I am planning on getting the apple raid card and 4 hard disk. I am not sure on all the terms like raid 0, 1, 5 etc but my question is which is the best option

1. Mirror hd 1 & 2, mirror hd 3 & 4

2. make hd 1 & 2 one big drive and then use HD 3 & 4 to mirror hd 1 & 2

3. Raid 5

I was told raid 5 will slow down HD access/ writing time but would it make that much of a difference if I am mainly using CS3.?

Any input would be very much appreciated

Perry

[Martin_Doudoroff]

You haven't told us much about your actual needs, particularly with respect to the volumes of data you'll be hefting around and the backup/archiving strategy you have in mind. Unless you are doing an extraordinarily high volume of work, I would probably advise against any of the courses of action you describe, including purchasing (grossly overpriced) drives from Apple or messing around with RAID. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, you're probably best off keeping this all simple. For example, keep the drive that comes with the machine as your boot disk. Order a Seagate ST31000340NS or two (or three if you'll actually use it); these Seagate drives are blazingly fast and quite affordable (1TB for $300). Besides, installing drives in a Mac Pro is so easy and so cool it's actually kind of fun.

If you want to talk more specifically about your backup and archiving needs, there are people here who will try to be of assistance, but we need you to get much more specific.

Side note: although Apple overcharges for RAM, I actually do recommend ordering your system from them with the full quantity of RAM you want. You could certainly order your own RAM and install it, but if anything is wrong with the third party RAM, the time you'll waste sorting it out just isn't worth it.

[perrycho]

Originally Posted by Martin_Doudoroff

You haven't told us much about your actual needs, particularly with respect to the volumes of data you'll be hefting around and the backup/archiving strategy you have in mind. Unless you are doing an extraordinarily high volume of work, I would probably advise against any of the courses of action you describe, including purchasing (grossly overpriced) drives from Apple or messing around with RAID. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, you're probably best off keeping this all simple. For example, keep the drive that comes with the machine as your boot disk. Order a Seagate ST31000340NS or two (or three if you'll actually use it); these Seagate drives are blazingly fast and quite affordable (1TB for $300). Besides, installing drives in a Mac Pro is so easy and so cool it's actually kind of fun.

If you want to talk more specifically about your backup and archiving needs, there are people here who will try to be of assistance, but we need you to get much more specific.

Side note: although Apple overcharges for RAM, I actually do recommend ordering your system from them with the full quantity of RAM you want. You could certainly order your own RAM and install it, but if anything is wrong with the third party RAM, the time you'll waste sorting it out just isn't worth it.

Thanks Martin for you response.

I actually have heaps of photo data as I own both 1dmkIII and 1dsmkIII and as you can see, the files from 1dsmkIII is huge when converted to tiff. I have actually jump the gun and already purchased 4 Seagate ST31000340NS Barracuda ES 7200.2 1TB drives and ordered 16gig of ram from Crucial.com.

My plan was to just purchase the basic apple mac pro configuration plus the raid card. I will then take the 320gig HD out and use it as a backup drive of the original software.

I was not sure if I should actually purchase the raid card or just run software raid. Yes I know the raid card is very expensive, for something that most probably cost 100 to manufacture but I am concern about the reliabilty of these rather large drives. I rather spend the money to be safe than to be sorry later. I am just not sure what is the best raid configuration to use.

One more thing, does anyone here know if there will be a new 30" apple display being released soon. I will wait till june to see what happens. I am tempted to get the HP 30" LCD but I do like the look of the apple display. I think the LCD panel in the HP is much newer but is that correct the apple LCD is better for color callibration?

Perry

[Martin_Doudoroff]

Originally Posted by perrycho

I have actually jump the gun and already purchased 4 Seagate ST31000340NS Barracuda ES 7200.2 1TB drives and ordered 16gig of ram from Crucial.com.

You'll probably do just fine.

Originally Posted by perrycho

My plan was to just purchase the basic apple mac pro configuration plus the raid card. I will then take the 320gig HD out and use it as a backup drive of the original software. I am just not sure what is the best raid configuration to use.

Unfortunately, there don't appear to be a many credible reviews of the Apple RAID card's performance, yet. There are a couple generally-positive, perfunctory reviews on Apple's site, and a couple sniping reviews by blowhards on the web that are mainly based on feature comparisons rather than actual testing. You may be the first person on this forum to seriously consider this avenue.

One of the advantages of the Apple solution is that it comes with Apple-produced configuration software that—allegedly—takes most of the uncertainty and doubt out of setting up your RAID. If you're committed to RAID, then you're probably best off focusing on either RAID 5 or RAID 0+1. Straight RAID 1 isn't so compelling unless you see value in having two 1TB volumes lying around. Keep in mind that unless you're planning to do a lot of real-time compositing of multiple HD video streams, striping is probably not going to provide you with a lot of real-world benefits beyond larger volume capacity. Provided there's no devil lurking in the details of the Apple card's RAID 5 performance, then RAID 5 might be the best place to start. (A peak 250MB/s throughput should seldom be a liability for a photographer.)

Originally Posted by perrycho

One more thing, does anyone here know if there will be a new 30" apple display being released soon. I will wait till june to see what happens. I am tempted to get the HP 30" LCD but I do like the look of the apple display. I think the LCD panel in the HP is much newer but is that correct the apple LCD is better for color callibration?

You're not the only person wondering. Monitor updates from Apple are drastically overdue. Unfortunately, I have no inside news on the subject.

Apple's displays calibrate reasonably well and actually handle color pretty reasonably out of the box, without calibration (when attached to a Mac). They're not in the same league with, say, EIZO, but as a photographer doing my own fine art printing, my 23" Apple Cinema Display has been more than adequate. (I'm also waiting for Apple to rev the 30"; then I will probably buy one or two of those.)

[Noel_Carboni]

I can't add much, but I can offer a personal perspective...

Martin wrote:

striping is probably not going to provide you with a lot of real-world benefits beyond larger volume capacity

As a user of a Raid 0 setup for 3 years now (on a PC workstation), I can tell you that there ARE real benefits to striping. Everything is - and stays - quicker and more responsive. It's hard to quantify, but you do feel it. Any other computer feels sluggish to me.

-Noel

[Martin_Doudoroff]

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

As a user of a Raid 0 setup for 3 years now (on a PC workstation), I can tell you that there ARE real benefits to striping. Everything is - and stays - quicker and more responsive. It's hard to quantify, but you do feel it. Any other computer feels sluggish to me.

And a couple months ago I went from a RAID 0 setup to a non-RAID setup without detriment. Clearly, there are other contributing factors.

[Jerry Skrocki]

One thing that has not been mentioned here is the need for a fast separate scratch disk. For Photoshop users this is a necessity and the OP has not taken this into consideration with the purchase of four 1 TB hard drives.

With a Raid 0 configuration for the operating system, speed gained is negated by the loss of hard drive space. You would be essentially reducing hard drive space by 50%. The four terabytes you paid for are now two terabytes. The MacPro is a very fast machine and the need for a raid set up for photography is relatively nonexistent. If the OP was a videographer then a raid solution would make more sense.

Using one of the internal drives for TimeMachine makes more sense. A fast internal drive for scratch disk also makes sense (but not 1 terabyte).

Jerry

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