Just about to buy a new 8-core mac and am seeing I could get it with 300GB SAS drives. Does anybody have experience of these drives and able to comment on improvement over SATA 7,200rpm? A lot of momentum in my scores is coming from 32nd note movement in the strings and I want to live pop-n-crackle free!
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SAS Drives 15,000rpm - worth it for a new VI Machine??
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I JUST PURCHASED A MAC MPD 8 CORE 3GHZ WITH TWO 15K SPIN DRIVES. THESE HAVE THE SAME SPEED AS THE 15K SPIN CHEETAHS I HAVE USED FOR YEARS IN MY G5 DUAL 2.5 MACHINE and I couldn't live without them. oops sorry, caps lock was on. Anyway, I would not run VSL or any VI without these drives anymore as they have made my life trouble free and certainly decreased stress. I would say if you do get the raid card buy a couple of these 15k spins for the VI's and sessions of your DAW and as you can add on as they are only available at abut 300GB. I also use the Raptors with no issues and will be porting over one from my G5 with the new machine next week. I also plan to buy another ATTO card for my original SCSI collection and run them in a toaster. Never doubt the improved response of your system using these fast tools. Good luck. Cheers
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Thanks Gary - a couple of other questions: 1. do the faster drives lead to more heat/fan noise? 2. not clear if your system drive is also a 15k - if so, does this speed up system response generally? (your tag line: no it doesn't make you a bad person...for my part I'm scoring natural history and environmental films) Cheers, Robert
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Thanks Robert. :) On the drive noise yes a bit more but not even noticeable if in the bay trays. No worries. My 15k spin scsi's are quiet and I would expect the same from SAS. The machines always scale up the fans when driven hard and this would be more of a concern I would think. I'm hoping the 3ghz will still remain quiet but who knows. That's why I chose it, the 3.2 just scarred me a bit because of that reason. I'll post here on my experiences but I'm really excited about more instances being available in the new system. Cheers,
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For those wanting really high speed drive solutions I'd suggest checking out the tests on the Arizona Mac Users Group website (www.amug.org) before committing to Apple's expensive SAS drive solution. For example one can get an Areca ARC-1221x 8 port PCIe card (capable of RAID 6 which has has high speed and greater redundancy than RAID 5 - - a RAID 6 array can rebuild itself if two drives fail simultaneously, a RAID 5 array can rebuild itself if one drive fails) for about $600, an EnhanceBox E8-ML SATA 8 bay enclosure for about $520 and 8 Seagate 320GB 7200.10 drives for $640. The two cables necessary to connect the card to the enclosure are $120 ($60 each).
According to the highly detailed tests on the AMUG website, the average read speed of a 1.75 GB RAID 6 array composed of this equipment is 359MB/sec, the average write speed is 377MB/sec - - figures that compare favorably to Apple's advertised maximum of 250MB/sec for its RAID 5 solution. The Apple RAID card + 4 drives costs $3850 whereas the solution described above costs $1880. Also important to note is that, as far as I know, Areca makes the only SATA RAID cards for external drives that are capable of booting a MacPro.
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This is great information..... For myself, I want the system to be contained within the mac itself. I have custom Anvil cases for my desktop mac which travel. That and the fact that the raid card sold for the '08 macs uses the internal harnessing to plug the drives is such an elegant solution that I will pay up for it. I wanted to stick to ATTO and buy their card but when I found out they changed the drives to plug on the inside of the tray, it nixed any other solution I could use.