MAC PRO Config Suggestion ?

[Sofiane Benabdallah]

Hi, We want to buy a powerfull Mac Pro to work with the RED ONE and probably with the EPIC Later.

We were thinking about this configuration...

Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem”
16GB (8x2GB)
Mac Pro RAID Card
1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
One 18x SuperDrive
Apple Mighty Mouse
Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad

Bluray Disc Burner

2 X 24" LCD Screen Hyundai W240

HD Decklink xtreme 2K ? Is there any equivalent card for 4k?
Matrox Compressor HD ?

Thanks for your help.
We gotta buy it in June '09. And we work in Paris (FRANCE).

 

[Rafael Giuliano]

I think the best card for RED and ProRes 422 is AJA Kona.

Are you sure the MP supports Bluray Burner?

I think you guys should wait to buy I MP because of the WWDC 09. Wait to see the changes apple will announce and then you can decide better. They might release a better MP and they will for sure release the Snow Leopard.

 

[BigLu]

I like it
Id consider putting 1.5 TB drives in instead of 1TB drives in
and buy the drives online or Frys much much cheaper
same with RAM online Newegg.com save hundres right off the bat.

I dont know that monitor, if you dont like Cinema displays check out Dell great monitors.

 

[Sofiane Benabdallah]

I think the best card for RED and ProRes 422 is AJA Kona.

Are you sure the MP supports Bluray Burner?

I think you guys should wait to buy I MP because of the WWDC 09. Wait to see the changes apple will announce and then you can decide better. They might release a better MP and they will for sure release the Snow Leopard.

Thanks for the tip bout the aja kona

Yeah i guess we'll wait to see what they say at wwdc09, but i dont think they will release a new mp anytime soon, i mean we need something to work now.

I like it
Id consider putting 1.5 TB drives in instead of 1TB drives in
and buy the drives online or Frys much much cheaper
same with RAM online Newegg.com save hundres right off the bat.

I dont know that monitor, if you dont like Cinema displays check out Dell great monitors.

Thanks!

So 1.5tb is possible? im askin because today we went to a store which is an official apple reseller, they said we couldnt put 1.5tb drive which surprised us.

These apple cinema displays still quiet expansive




ANY OTHER SUGGESTIONS?

 

[Michael P. Schmidt]

Are you sure the MP supports Bluray Burner?

we have two Blu-ray burners (Pioneer BD-RW BDR-202) working on MAC Pro's ... and quite well by the way ... of course u can't watch blu-ray on Mac-OS X but you can burn (like hell) :sifone:

 

[Michael P. Schmidt]

we have two Blu-ray burners (Pioneer BD-RW BDR-202) working on MAC Pro's ... and quite well by the way ... of course u can't watch blu-ray on Mac-OS X but you can burn (like hell) :sifone:

BTW: ... in external USB casing

 

[Michael P. Schmidt]

2nd BTW ... you can burn "Blu-ray" on DVDs ... with Toast ... called Blu ray9 ( I guess ) even with an DVD burner !

 

[Uli Plank]

Yes, you can do Blu-Rays with Toast (9 or 10), but only single-shots, not ready for replication.

 

[Michael P. Schmidt]

Yes, you can do Blu-Rays with Toast (9 or 10), but only single-shots, not ready for replication.

who can afford an replication ;-)

 

[Rafael Giuliano]

Nice to hear about the blurays on MP. Can you use a internal bluray drive or just external one like Michael P. Schmidt.

The guy from apple reseller is right is not possible to put a 1.5 TB inside of the mac. Very easy, the max you can put inside of MP is 4TB, you have 4 bays, so each HD has 1TB.

I hope it help!!

 

[Sofiane Benabdallah]

I think the best card for RED and ProRes 422 is AJA Kona.

I went on their website, but it looks like their card is most likely for FINAL CUT only, but not for ADOBE on Mac?

 

[Jonathan Stevenson]

Nice to hear about the blurays on MP. Can you use a internal bluray drive or just external one like Michael P. Schmidt.

The guy from apple reseller is right is not possible to put a 1.5 TB inside of the mac. Very easy, the max you can put inside of MP is 4TB, you have 4 bays, so each HD has 1TB.

I hope it help!!

I know plenty of people who use 1.5TB drives in their Mac Pro. Hell, I know folks using the 2TB western digital drives! The computer doesn't care what drives you use. Apple does

 

[Jaime Vallés]

I know plenty of people who use 1.5TB drives in their Mac Pro. Hell, I know folks using the 2TB western digital drives! The computer doesn't care what drives you use. Apple does

Exactly. As long as the drives are SATA, you can absolutely put in four 1.5TB drives (or even four 2TB drives!) in a Mac Pro. It doesn't void the warranty or anything.

 

[Stephen Lovett]

Raid Card

Raid Card

The Apple raid card is an expensive piece of crap.

Skip it and buy an Atto card instead.

I've got the Seagate 1.5T's in my MP, no issues.

All the best,

Steve

 

[mikeburton]

I also use three 1.5TB drives RAID 0 together in my MacPro working fantastic. I recommend the Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda Drives.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The Seagate 1.5TB drives are working pretty good here too. Actually, I did have one go bad on me last week in a RAID-5, but such is life. I knew it was going bad, so already had the replacement ready to go when it failed. Be sure the drives have the latest firmware. Actually as long as they don't have the CC1H firmware revision, you'll be OK.

I would recommend buying RAM and HDDs from somewhere other than Apple. Actually the current price for 16GB (8 x 2GB) from Apple isn't bad right now. If you intend to add third-party RAM, spend the small upgrade price to get the 8GB from Apple (4 x 2GB) and then buy the remaining RAM yourself -- saves the hassle of yanking and selling off the 6 x 1GB base RAM config.

I would recommend you NOT buy a card like the BlackMagic or AJA. These cards do little for helping with RED workflow other than some monitoring functions via FCP and Premiere. Or if you need SDI output to an HD deck, they're a good option. I would wait for the RED Rocket card, which should start shipping sometime in the next couple months.

Blu-Ray burners work just great, as others have pointed out. The LG external USB2.0 is excellent. You can also throw an LG or Pioneer or whatever into an external SATA enclosure and add eSATA to your system. Internal drives can be connected too, but it's more of a hassle on the Mac Pro and not worth the effort, IMO. I have an LG installed internally on mine using the ODD SATA header.

In addition to buying drives on your own, I would also recommend a good RAID controller. The CalDigit RAID card is excellent, but limits you to using their HD Element RAID units externally. The ATTO R3xx and R6xx cards are excellent RAID solutions. None of these cards support BootCamp on the new Mac Pro, if you need that

In my primary Mac Pro, here's what I have:

8 core 3.2GHz
16GB (8 x 2GB)
4 x 1TB 7200rpm Hitachi HDDs
CalDigit RAID card
2 x External CalDigit HD-Element 6TB RAIDs (4x 1.5TB in each)
GeForce 8800GT 512MB video driving 2 x Dell 30" LCDs
16X SuperDrive
External LG Blu-Ray
Quantum LTO-4 HH tape backup connected to LSI controller.
CalDigit 4-channel eSATA adapter for connecting other stuff.

My internal drives are connected to the CalDigit and are a single RAID-5. The two external 6TB units are each RAID-5, then striped together as a RAID-0. Gives me almost 9TB of usable formatted space and sustains around 420MB/s and peaks up to about 550MB/s, which is the limit of the RAID controller.

And yes, the Apple RAID card is a complete piece of shit. Don't waste your time, it also doesn't support boot camp, has no external connectivity, costs 4X what it should cost and it has no management tools or ability. It likes to recondition the backup battery every 30 days or so and will do so without warning. When it does, it shuts off the controller cache so your RAID will run SLOOOOOOOOWWWW for about 12 hours until it completes. No ability to schedule, abort, etc. I pulled the Apple card from my system and replaced with a CalDigit for this reason alone.

...I have an Apple RAID card for sale... Cheap.

I would actually recommend an ATTO RAID card right now. A bit more freedom to configure with various devices vs. the CalDigit. And you can connect the HP and Tandberg LTO tape drives directly to it instead of using some half-supported bastard controller like the LSI card that comes with my Quantum LTO.

 

[Nick Gallegos]

Also keep in mind that on the new 2009 Mac Pros, internal hardware RAID is currently possible ONLY with Apple's own RAID card. The internal blackplane on the older Mac Pros let you bypass the internal SATA controllers by moving the iPass cable to virtually any compatible RAID controller. The new models aren't set up like this -- the drive backplane is physically soldered to the logic board, making it impossible. And as such, only the Apple RAID card is capable of bypassing the stock SATA bus by overriding it at ROM-level. Gee thanks, Apple!

This is not to say that you can't still get a 3rd-party RAID card with external SATA ports and feed an external array...

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Uh, not exactly. Apple is still shipping the same RAID card that connects to the internal drives via a mini-SAS style IPASS cable.

However, you are correct that the primary SATA header is now soldered to the backplane and a system without the RAID card does not include the IPASS cable. The way it works now is the backplane must be accessed from behind, install the proper IPASS cable and move a jumper clip. Then that lets you install the Apple RAID card (or other RAID card).

But it's hard to get the proper IPASS cable from Apple Parts and then there's the hassle of doing it.

It's actually easier to just run your own cables and bypass the internal backplane altogether. But this isn't that great either as it requires flipping the drives around in their caddies or using different / modified caddies to allow clearance for the cables. I think PowerMax or MaxDigital or one of the Apple mod sites is selling alternative drive caddies for this purpose.

 

[Nick Gallegos]

Uh, not exactly. Apple is still shipping the same RAID card that connects to the internal drives via a mini-SAS style IPASS cable.

However, you are correct that the primary SATA header is now soldered to the backplane and a system without the RAID card does not include the IPASS cable. The way it works now is the backplane must be accessed from behind, install the proper IPASS cable and move a jumper clip. Then that lets you install the Apple RAID card (or other RAID card).

But it's hard to get the proper IPASS cable from Apple Parts and then there's the hassle of doing it.

It's actually easier to just run your own cables and bypass the internal backplane altogether. But this isn't that great either as it requires flipping the drives around in their caddies or using different / modified caddies to allow clearance for the cables. I think PowerMax or MaxDigital or one of the Apple mod sites is selling alternative drive caddies for this purpose.

Interesting, because all indications seemed to point to the RAID card for the 2009 MP being different and not using an iPass cable at all... However, you seem to have to direct experience with this (I'm still holding on to my Early 2008 model), so I'll take your word for it.

That being said, as I continue to appreciate Apple's clutter-free case designs, it seems that they're making it gradually harder on pros that require more elaborate internal hardware setups. But a lot of this might have to do with the fact that they've been using the same base case design on their towers for 5+ years.

 

[Sofiane Benabdallah]

The Seagate 1.5TB drives are working pretty good here too. Actually, I did have one go bad on me last week in a RAID-5, but such is life. I knew it was going bad, so already had the replacement ready to go when it failed. Be sure the drives have the latest firmware. Actually as long as they don't have the CC1H firmware revision, you'll be OK.

I would recommend buying RAM and HDDs from somewhere other than Apple. Actually the current price for 16GB (8 x 2GB) from Apple isn't bad right now. If you intend to add third-party RAM, spend the small upgrade price to get the 8GB from Apple (4 x 2GB) and then buy the remaining RAM yourself -- saves the hassle of yanking and selling off the 6 x 1GB base RAM config.

I would recommend you NOT buy a card like the BlackMagic or AJA. These cards do little for helping with RED workflow other than some monitoring functions via FCP and Premiere. Or if you need SDI output to an HD deck, they're a good option. I would wait for the RED Rocket card, which should start shipping sometime in the next couple months.

Blu-Ray burners work just great, as others have pointed out. The LG external USB2.0 is excellent. You can also throw an LG or Pioneer or whatever into an external SATA enclosure and add eSATA to your system. Internal drives can be connected too, but it's more of a hassle on the Mac Pro and not worth the effort, IMO. I have an LG installed internally on mine using the ODD SATA header.

In addition to buying drives on your own, I would also recommend a good RAID controller. The CalDigit RAID card is excellent, but limits you to using their HD Element RAID units externally. The ATTO R3xx and R6xx cards are excellent RAID solutions. None of these cards support BootCamp on the new Mac Pro, if you need that

In my primary Mac Pro, here's what I have:

8 core 3.2GHz
16GB (8 x 2GB)
4 x 1TB 7200rpm Hitachi HDDs
CalDigit RAID card
2 x External CalDigit HD-Element 6TB RAIDs (4x 1.5TB in each)
GeForce 8800GT 512MB video driving 2 x Dell 30" LCDs
16X SuperDrive
External LG Blu-Ray
Quantum LTO-4 HH tape backup connected to LSI controller.
CalDigit 4-channel eSATA adapter for connecting other stuff.

My internal drives are connected to the CalDigit and are a single RAID-5. The two external 6TB units are each RAID-5, then striped together as a RAID-0. Gives me almost 9TB of usable formatted space and sustains around 420MB/s and peaks up to about 550MB/s, which is the limit of the RAID controller.

And yes, the Apple RAID card is a complete piece of shit. Don't waste your time, it also doesn't support boot camp, has no external connectivity, costs 4X what it should cost and it has no management tools or ability. It likes to recondition the backup battery every 30 days or so and will do so without warning. When it does, it shuts off the controller cache so your RAID will run SLOOOOOOOOWWWW for about 12 hours until it completes. No ability to schedule, abort, etc. I pulled the Apple card from my system and replaced with a CalDigit for this reason alone.

...I have an Apple RAID card for sale... Cheap.

I would actually recommend an ATTO RAID card right now. A bit more freedom to configure with various devices vs. the CalDigit. And you can connect the HP and Tandberg LTO tape drives directly to it instead of using some half-supported bastard controller like the LSI card that comes with my Quantum LTO.

Thanks a lot.:beer:

Can I Pm you if I have more questions about the RED Workflow?