PowerMac Says Goodbye

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

Can the OS be run off of a firewire 800 drive? If it could then you could leave the full 4 drives for uncompressed HD.

No, I don't believe it can. But, the simple solution is to install an external sata interface card and an external sata raid enclosure and populate it instead. I like this idea better anyway. For me, the internal drive bays would be great for adding archival type storage, say for high res RAW picture data and DV TAPE archiving.

-gb-

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

I really don't see a lot of people rushing out to buy one of these if they already have a quad G5.

Probably not, but just like the auto industry there will always be people in their own upgrade cycle who will purchase this machine. Or, if they need additional capacity, this machine would be a nice addition to a quad G5.

-gb-

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Levan Bakhia

How can you raid them? Do you need a raid controller for that or software raid will work as well?

Mac OSX provides for software raid. Here's a screenshot of the disk utility application.

[Ron Johnson]

Re: Can the OS run off of a FW800 drive?

It can from an external drive - at least on a G4 PowerBook. My system drive had become corrupted, but I had an external FW800 drive that had been given a full, bootable copy of the system before it crashed (via Super Duper). During boot-up, one holds down the Option key until the screen displays options for which drive to boot from. Choose the external drive and in about the same amount of time for a normal boot-up (<30 seconds), the machine will run happily from the external drive.

[Nathan Troutman]

Now that the power mac has made the change and is all PC on the inside wrapped up in a Mac OS can I finally buy PC video cards at those great PC video card prices to do future upgrades down the road? I've hated for years buying a Radeon 9800 Pro mac card that costs $150 more than the PC version. This made me really hate being a mac user. I'm hoping it's a thing of the past.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Originally Posted by Nathan Troutman

Now that the power mac has made the change and is all PC on the inside wrapped up in a Mac OS can I finally buy PC video cards at those great PC video card prices to do future upgrades down the road? I've hated for years buying a Radeon 9800 Pro mac card that costs $150 more than the PC version. This made me really hate being a mac user. I'm hoping it's a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, no. It's not the cards/hardware that are different, but rather driver support. It would be great if nVidia and ATI would start making OSX drivers available for their off-the-shelf cards. But as of right now, OSX video drivers are only available for certain cards and typically via Apple only or an approved manufacturer. Apple is also famous for requiring their video cards or those approved for their systems to have special flags in their BIOS or firmware. So even if you wanted to save $1200 by buying a Quadro FX4500 from a third-party vendor (like PNY or EVGA, PNY happens to make the FX4500 cards used in the PowerMac and new Mac Pro), you can't -- they won't work. Or at least this wasn't the case a couple years ago and I haven't heard about it changing for the better... :(

[Evan Digby]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

The only problem with the 4 drive raid-0 is the fact that this same raid-0 will also contain the OS, program files and any other garbage you put on there. It is never a good idea to share a media drive with the OS. I really wish Apple would have put in 5 bays. 1 for the OS and garbage and 4 for the raid-0.

This is all very unfortunate, although we have one redeeming aspect:

"With Mac OS X installed on the primary hard drive and three Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drives striped together as a data storage volume, your Mac Pro can deliver data rates up to 174MB per second - almost three times as fast as previous generations and perfect for film and video, music, and other drive-intensive operations. "

-- Taken from the apple store blurb on the hard drives in the system configuration.

If you only want to stripe, it sounds like you don't need to use an even number of drives. OSX will stripe 3 of them together. So buy a smaller drive for your system, save some cash, and put 3 500gb hdds and you can get "up to" 174mb per second. I would imagine sustained sits around 120ish, but that's just a guess that could be optimistic -- I don't really know anything about OSX's RAID.

[Barry Gribble]

So if you put 3 500 GB drives together in a RAID, what is the totaly amount of disk space you will have available? Isn't there some redundancy that eats space?

[Evan Digby]

Originally Posted by Barry Gribble

So if you put 3 500 GB drives together in a RAID, what is the totaly amount of disk space you will have available? Isn't there some redundancy that eats space?

RAID-0 doesn't provide any redundancy, so you won't lose space to that. With any file system, it takes space to create a structure which allows the OS to find the files, so you won't get exactly 1500GB of space using 3 500gb drives. The loss should be minimal. I don't know enough about the file systems / raid controller that macs use to give you an exact number.

[Phillip Palacios]

I can't find wheather the new mac pros take the new 750gb drives. if they do, then that means 2.25tb in the three raid 0 drives- nice start for hd video.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

3 drives in a RAID 0 config will work great. As with all current hard drives, the capacities quoted are based on 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes and not the 1,048,576 bytes that make a megabyte within a binary addressing system. So real world HDD capacities come into play and you lose approximately 7% of the advertised drive space because of this. Formatted capacity of a "500GB" hard drive is about 465GB on both Windows and Mac platforms. Very little is lost to overhead and OS/filesystem stuff (about 8 to 24 MB in most cases). In a Mac Pro with 3x500 in a RAID-0 volume, that would give you about 1,397GB to work with.

[Paulo Teixeira]

Here is some interesting information.
http://appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1958
http://appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1957

[Heath McKnight]

Architecture of the Mac Pro:

http://developer.apple.com/documenta...04479-BCIGAACJ

hwm

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Originally Posted by Phillip Palacios

I can't find wheather the new mac pros take the new 750gb drives. if they do, then that means 2.25tb in the three raid 0 drives- nice start for hd video.

They will support the drives just fine, but quantities are limited and I'm guessing the drives haven't passed all of Apple's QC checks just yet. But no reason someone couldn't buy them from a third-party supplier and hook 'em up. Apple will probably offer the upcoming 750GB and 1TB drives (due early next year) within a reasonable amount of time. It took them about 2 months to offer the 500GB drives from the time they started showing in the consumer channel. ...Apple's a bit slow on adding new components, but you know that whatever they are offering will just work.

[Chris Hocking]

I know very little about the insides of Macs, but wouldn't it be possible to, instead of having two super drives, just replace one of them with a systems drive? I presume they just use a normal 3 Gbps SATA bus?

That way you could have your four RAID drives for media, a super drive and a systems drive? I'm presuming if the new Macs are anything like my old PCs, you can just put the hard drive in the same spot as the super drive would have gone.

Better yet, you could just buy a firewire burner (I presume firewire dual layer DVD burners exists?), and have 6 SATA hard drives in there and 2 ATA/100 drives.

Oh yeah, why can't the system drive just go on the ATA bus anyway? Will that bring down performance?

Anyway, I could just be talking rubbish. As I said, I know very little about the inner workings on Macs.