New Mac Pro I/O Abilities

[Cameron Vokey]

Since the other Mac Pro thread is full of excitement, it might be a good idea to start a thread dedicated to the I/O issues we're all facing with this new Mac Pro. Unless there's another (couldn't find it)?

At our office, we are about to start a huge post-production process of about 40TBs of red footage and we haven't been upgrading our towers for obvious reasons.

Are people just going to buy up a ton of the older 12-Cores and upgrade the pants off of them? Until we know definitively what the I/O limitation is (approx 3Gbps), do we continue to wait and hope that the final version adds some kind of PCI slots? It's not totally ruled out... is it?

 

[Dave Blackham]

Id recon TB2 but that can be bonded so gives 20Gbit sec from what I read online. If that actualy is achieveable or runs at wire speed I have no idea. I had asked, but go no reply, if you can bond more than 2 TB2 channels.

Who knows about PCI slots, Im thinking not. We don't see them in iMacs and so on, I think the only place with be in a card expansion chassis.

We need TB3 I think.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Typically, if you have that much data and you need to get going in short order, you put an ATTO R680 in a MacPro running an external 8 platter RAID.

At the moment a rMBP or iMac with TB1 connected to a TB1 RAID like the Promise is likely a better solution, in part because the TB1 RAID will plug right into TB2 (at TB1 speeds, but still) down the road.

If you can wait for the new MacPro, do so. TB2 I/O is expected to handle 1,500MB/s so I highly doubt it will be the bottleneck.

Cheers - #19

 

[Rob Anderson]

We've been evaluating if we can (or should) make the the ATTO Thunderbolt conversion box work between a new Mac Pro and our existing RAID 50 machines. We've got a lot of external TB's plus external graphics cards and RED Rocket arrays to use. Right now, all of that gets piped into existing Mac Pro's (2012 models) via an ATTO card via mini SAS.

If TB2 (whenever ATTO updates their Thunderbolt breakout box to support it) can sustain the same speeds we were getting out of a mini SAS card directly into the machine, I can't see why we wouldn't upgrade. But if that kind of daisy-chaining causes degradation in performance, no thanks. We're perfectly fine with our USB 3.0, mini SAS, 2x 3.06 GHz 12-core Xeon, 2012 Mac Pro's with 128 GB of RAM and 4x internal SSD RAIDs (plus Radeon HD 7950's with 3GB). Hard to imagine the new Mac Pro beating these things down... But we'll see.

This is really why overall we're less than impressed with Apple's Mac Pro reveal. For us, it's marginal at best and cuts down on a lot of packed in hardware. We anticipate a lot more cables, power cords, and other crap on desks. Not really thrilled about that.

A saucy Apple 4K monitor would get us excited real fast however...

 

[Will Keir]

Rob, you got those in a Raid configuration? What drives are you using and what speeds (MB/s) are you seeing?

Thanks in advance.

4x internal SSD RAIDs

 

[Eric Santiago]

A saucy Apple 4K monitor would get us excited real fast however...

So true so true

If there is no way of getting from the recent MP to an Apple 4 K display then the choice is a iMiniMonolith.

But honestly the new MPs would just be an addition to what we have here (which is almost the same set up as you).

Were not looking to replace anything, crap we still have 2006 MPs here doing grunt work

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

I love my 2006 MP! Trying to figure out if I should deck out a new 2012 now or take a leap on the 2013.

 

[Brian Merlen]

Until the price of its out I cant say what I want to do. I do need a new machine, that much is apparently evident. Simply for the faster ports alone any machine would work well for me. Right now I am ironically debating waiting on the Mac Pro or jumping on a Mac Air. Sure the Air lacks the horse power, but for mobility and the fact I could buy it today kind of makes up for it. Plus if I hooked an external rocket to a Mac Air, it will fly...fully spec'd it out of course...


So I think I will keep waiting for the Mac Pro. That has been what I have said for a few years now...Once its out I will make a purchase of something I guess...

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The Air systems are pretty weak sauce. I would recommend a Macbook Pro retina, but not right now, updates are expected within the next 3 to 6 weeks. So unless you absolutely have to have it tomorrow... And doesn't sound like you do if you're contemplating the new Pro.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

If they release a 15" rMBP with 4x TB2 ports and a decent GPU I'd have my credit card out in a heartbeat.

Cheers - #19

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'd dump my MBPr right now for a new one if I could have 32+ GB RAM!

and while new mobile CPUs are due soon, Apple may hold the update until TB2 is ready.