Wise words from a wise person.

Thanks for all that good info Miklos![:D]

My understanding is JBOD will yield superior performance to RAID.

Maybe that is true, but Miklos didn't comment about JBOD or RAID, but over the capabilities of the internal FW800 port in a Mac that theoretically can host quite a number of devices in one chain, but as he said it's not very practical for the abovementioned needs. Seperate controller doesn't always mean RAID, and it seems that you might be better of with a seperate controller for each drive you add from his post.

PolarBear

Yes you may be right for sample streaming with 2 drives but not when you are using SATA with 4 drives or more. Well that is my understanding. Seek times are faster with 2 drives on a JBOD but it's irrelevant with 4 or more drives.

Opinions?

Anyway the above advice still stands, you're better off with SATA 4 disks and JBOD than FW 4 disks and JBOD.

Could somebody please explain what JBOD is? I'm not familiar with this term.

I'm interested in this discussion because the S Cube will require more disk space and I want to make sure I have the best possible system.

Regards - Colin

just want to throw in that the dual cores seem to have two firewire buses internally.

When I connect on fface800 though fw800 and another one through fw400 they run at different speed. (This was also pointed out by a apple guy (on Cubase forum).) But with the fface there was no advantage of one config over another.

So connect your interface to the 800 and your drives to the 400 ports on the dual gives you independent fw-streams.

Best

Well back to the original question. The Performance with the Quad G5 is pretty damned smooth. I got mine a few weeks ago and it's really great. As you'd expect.

Running Logic Pro 7 and at least 50 EXS instances with no problems at all. I have 4 gig of Ram in this machine. The only thing I wish I could do is get more Ram and have logic recognize it, but I'm told that It can only address upto 3.7 gig.

Overall performance. Everything is tweaked, the simplest things open and operate blindingly fast. In fact the only thing I feel that is being a drag on the system is the HD, which is a Western Digital. I believe that Maxtor acheives better read/write benchmarks, and so would be a good improvement to this system.

Over My G4 this thing is just awesome. It's sheer computational power is staggering. And suffice it to say that for my VSL needs a doubt very much that I will want another machine anytime soon. Perhaps just more Ram, A faster HD, and the VI cube to really test it's capabilities.

Hey, here's a thought, how about sending me the VI cube and I'll test it for you [[:D]] Let you know how it goes like!! (Well ... worth a try!) [[:D]]

The big question everyones asking is ... is it worh the price. Well I got it as a birthday present but it cost around 4,000 euros for my particular model .. and that was with a discount! It's hard for me to say anything bad about it as it performs like a F***ing Ferrari, but I would say that for all you people looking at new macs, that there is not a huge speed improvement over exsisting Dual 2.7 (Nornal Dual chips that is). The main improvements really is in the bus archiecture which does communicate better with the processors, and of course it can number crunch twice as much data in one cycle.

I'd still say get it if you can, if you run logic, and your like me ... IE unimpressed with the idea of having an Intel chip in your Mac,... this is an awesome machine for that purpose. But just be warned ... it doesn't operate at 10 ghz. Sorry guys .. it's still only 2.5 ... but it does do, as I say, twice as much as the nearest competing Mac.

It's worth noting that the inside of the machine has been reworked alot since the Dual 2.7 macs. The archiecture is now all PCI express .. instead of PCI-X, so older PCI audio cards will not fit!! But Wow .. it is soooooo quiet. I thought that the 2.7 system was quiet .. this thing you can barely hear at all.

It also includes 2 ethernet ports, an extra USB 2.0 port (So theres 3 on the back, one on the front, and two up on the keyboard). As well as the usual Optical in and out which is damned useful with my DAT machine.

So, there you go.

JBOD = just a bunch of disks, regularly connected via IDE, S-ATA or FireWire/USB2 as single drives - to point out that the drives are *not* operating in a RAID configuration.

Heteroyn - if you're going for speed benchmarks, the latest Seagate drives with NCQ (all other TCQ drives almost on par) usually win all tests in the IDE/S-ATA world, even with not so much distance to the WD Raptors - well, those are the true winners of course, but the heat... the money... the heat...

Cheers,
PolarBear

@Another User said:

JBOD = just a bunch of disks

[:D] Thanks for that technical info!
It seems I've been running a JBOD system for some time without knowing it...

Good job on the review Hetoryn.

I can only compare the Quad to my old Dual 800 G4 and like you say the difference in noise level is just huge. The fans hardly ever kick in.

I'm using mine with a Fireface 800 connected via the FW400 port - as specified in the manual, 800 isn't necessary until you're running more than one Fireface, so I'm saving that for the few FW drives I have.

Which leads me onto my major problem; that of having enough drives to run all my samples (plus I do video editing too) and back everything up. I'm desperately waiting for an external PCIe SATA card to surface - I don't want to install internal drive expansion bays as I suspect the airflow will be ruined and I'll have a 'Hovercraft' in my studio again. If anyone turns one up, do let me know [[;)]] .

i've only just managed to port all my apps across and install all the software instruments again, as well as having just made the switch from Cubase to Logic, so I haven't tested fully yet, but with Final Cut Pro it flies along. I think FCP is probably better optimised than Logic but hopefully Appple will take care of that soon enough.

I have had one problem though which may or may not turn out to be serious. After installing Logic I went about setting up a Default Project and would get so far only for the Quad to freeze - I couldn't even Force Quit - and the fans would suddenly fire up at full tilt - some racket! The only option was to Power down and start again. This happened 3 or 4 times in Logic but then also happened a few times when Logic wasn't running. Strangely, it always happened when there was no CPU or Hard Drive activity. It may just be that i have to Re-Install the OS again with an Archive & Install procedure - it was working just fine for the first week or so.

Anyway, I'm sure I won't regret getting the Quad - just need that damn SATA card.

Cheers for now

Colin

I also used to use cubase ... wich I think I prefer over Logic .. but now that I'm used to logic I can't really switch back. However I do keep a copy of cubase 1.o6 on my mac for old file conversion, if I want to work on a piece in logic.

As for your crashing ... that sounds quite nasty. Usually a problem associated with Ram or CPU. I would say have a looksee inside your machine and make sure that the ram is seated properly. If it persists It can even be that one of the Processors is not working right. I have heard of a guy who had a dual system that just wouldn't work as it should, always crashing and it turned out to be his seccond processor wasn't working and so everytime the CPU overhead went to the second processor it would conk his system out.

It may not be the same with your system, but you might wanna run the hardware checking (Tech Tool) that I think came with your system .. I got one!

It's not a big deal if it is that cos Apple will sort that out pretty fast, they're pretty good about that sorta thing. Though It is a sad thing that it happens cos it does bring down that whole Apple experience.

For instance, my Quad system arrived with the generic video drivers .. Mac OS 10.4.2 Whch is not the right OS to run the new dual core systems with. 10.4.3 was written for them and also with the new vid drivers for my 6600 geforce card .. alright I was able to update all this cos I'm on DSL, but If I didn't have an internet connection I'd be pretty f**ked off at the 160 meg download that I needed to get before I could really start using the machine.

Also, After installing an extra 2 gig of ram myself I noticed that one of the pre-installed Ram sticks was actaully not secured properly and was slightly out of it's slot .. not enough for it to not work ... but still.

All trivial things of course, and easily solved. goes to prove that Apple are not impervious to a few errors, but after all this .. the machine is f**king great!