Mac Pro Upgrades

[Steve Sherrick]

Looking to add the following upgrades. At this moment what are the best options?

Video Card: Some say NVidia, but I'm thinking the ATI 3870 may offer best performance considering the driver support in OS X. Am I correct in this assumption.

Storage: This has been a long time coming. I've had a lot of different suggestions from various people, which has been great, but also makes the decision tougher. I need to be able to get sustainable speeds of 400 MB/s and I need to keep the budget at around $2K. One of the popular choices seems to be the Caldigit HDOne. I can pick up a 2TB system for about $2K. That's not a lot of storage for HD work, but I'm actually just looking for a RAID that can be used for final finishing of short form projects. I'll edit with proxies or ProRes and then do final conforms on the RAID.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 

[Jason Badham]

Video Card: Some say NVidia, but I'm thinking the ATI 3870 may offer best performance considering the driver support in OS X. Am I correct in this assumption.

I believe you are. On barefeats.com, they compared the 3870 to the 8800 and the 3870 beat out the 8800 on all three Motion 3 tests. From what I've seen, ATI seems to run better with all of the graphics intense FCS apps... I will be really interested once Snow Leopard comes out.

 

[M Hsu]

steve

consider this
highpoint 2322 RAID $229 at newegg
2 mini sas to sata cables (goes to the enclosure) from owc $50 each x2 = $100
2 granite digital sata 4 bay enclosures $578 each x 2 = $1160
and then as many samsung spinpoint 1 tb drives as you can afford. up to 8! They are between $150-180 depending on where you look and will only get cheaper. Don't get the 750s, the 1tbs are faster because of the bigger 3 platter system.

If you could afford it, 8 drives in a RAID 0 will be pretty quick. Plus you would have 8 tb of RAID. For your budget i think you could do 6 drives in a RAID 5 which would give you 5tb of space, enough speed for 1080 and some redundancy out of the RAID 5. I'm no IT guy, but after a lot of research, this seems like the most bang for the buck as of today. If you wanted to go cheaper, I'm running the same system with one enclosure and 4 drives and it's playing back 1080p in my tests on final cut no problem. Haven't done any heavy 1080p editing yet though. THe cool thing about this system is that as you need more power and speed you can just add drives up to 8. It's not SAS, but it's a LOT cheaper and still pretty wicked fast. It wasn't hard to assemble the system, although the RAID config is a little odd and done through safari. But not hard.

just so you know though, this probably won't handle 2k and defnitely not 4k playback.

good luck

 

[Matthew Rogers]

To be honest, you need to know that certain interfaces with the highpoint (I think only eSATA) will max out at 200MB's. I would suggest looking into the 2322 and a infiniband enclosure--it will probably be faster than the SATA or eSATA. Make sure you are getting a PM enclosure if you don't want to have a cable for each drive.

Matthew

 

[Steve Sherrick]

steve

consider this
highpoint 2322 RAID $229 at newegg
2 mini sas to sata cables (goes to the enclosure) from owc $50 each x2 = $100
2 granite digital sata 4 bay enclosures $578 each x 2 = $1160
and then as many samsung spinpoint 1 tb drives as you can afford. up to 8! They are between $150-180 depending on where you look and will only get cheaper. Don't get the 750s, the 1tbs are faster because of the bigger 3 platter system.

If you could afford it, 8 drives in a RAID 0 will be pretty quick. Plus you would have 8 tb of RAID. For your budget i think you could do 6 drives in a RAID 5 which would give you 5tb of space, enough speed for 1080 and some redundancy out of the RAID 5. I'm no IT guy, but after a lot of research, this seems like the most bang for the buck as of today. If you wanted to go cheaper, I'm running the same system with one enclosure and 4 drives and it's playing back 1080p in my tests on final cut no problem. Haven't done any heavy 1080p editing yet though. THe cool thing about this system is that as you need more power and speed you can just add drives up to 8. It's not SAS, but it's a LOT cheaper and still pretty wicked fast. It wasn't hard to assemble the system, although the RAID config is a little odd and done through safari. But not hard.

good luck

I'm looking into the SAS option right now which would give me the following.

8 Bay Enclosure - $469
2 Cables - $94
Areca ARC-1680x PCIe SAS RAID Controller - $739
8 Seagate 450GB SAS Hard Drive - ST3450856SS - $6300

3.5 TB of storage for about $7600. Expensive, but supposed to be very reliable and give exceptionally fast drive access, with sustained rates at 500 MB/s

I'm also looking at a 12 bay SATA system that configured with 12 TB of storage would come in at around $4500. This would include.

12 bay enclosure with trayless hotswappable
12 Seagate 7200.11 ES2 1TB SATA drives
Areca Controller card
Cables

And still looking at one of the off the shelf products, Caldigit, Dulce, and Maxx Digital.

 

[Sidney L. Plaut]

im getting around 370mb/s R/W on a Rocket raid setup through eSATA... so I think don´t think theres a 200mb limit...

 

[M Hsu]

To be honest, you need to know that certain interfaces with the highpoint (I think only eSATA) will max out at 200MB's. I would suggest looking into the 2322 and a infiniband enclosure--it will probably be faster than the SATA or eSATA. Make sure you are getting a PM enclosure if you don't want to have a cable for each drive.

Matthew

can you show us the specific info? I'm getting more than 200mbs on mine through esata and my granite digital enclosure but I'm sure it would be helpful for people to know which ones are problematic.