Questions on updating Mac Pro hard drives for those large D800 files.

[Morris Taub]

Dan,

1-  SSD for the OS, get it set up to perfection, all updates installed and then ghost it.
1 - SSD for the programs, download and install all updates that are known to work, then ghost it.

1-4 Hard drives either kept individually or put them into a RAID configuration (either RAID 0, 5 or 10)  Personally I prefer SCSI drives, my experience with them has shown them to be more reliable; however, I still have an external backup because as has been discussed ad nauseam, all hard drives will eventually fail.  :-) 

I think it's obvious, but install as much ram as your machine can handle and you can afford. 

Pardon the brevity, typos and any grammatical errors.

so, you keep your OS and applications on two separate drives?...does that help the applications with speed? I do wonder if the OS benefits too...I mean I've never tried anything like this before, that uses two of four bays in a mac pro, no?...like dan, I'm thinking to upgrade my computer soon and have started researching...have always had OS and applications on the same drive...

right now I'm working off a macbook pro connected via sata to a burly enclosure with five separate drives...I am contemplating a Mac Pro this time, get a new laptop for travel, etc...my current laptop, april 2008 model, has a standard 200gb drive, no ssd...it does what i need but it isn't the fastest kid on the block...

What do you mean by 'ghost it'? please...

brevity is usually good, no worries about typos and grammer...

[DeeJay]

I do this too on my Mac Pro.The difference is phenomenal.

I have 100GB SSD for OS, Apps
100GB SSD for dedicated scratch and cache
4x3tb Hitachi drives for 12tb Raid0 for Storage.
Move your stored mail etc off your main drive onto your Main storage drive with a symbolic link
Everything is backed up 2 more times with an eSata Sata Drive Dock.

I currently have 24GB of RAM but will soon swap out to 16GB sticks for 48GB of RAM. Mac Pro works best in triple channel RAM (e.g.. 3x8GB or 3x16GB or what ever)

Works like a dream

[chrismurphy]

Having to manage fast and slow storage manually is kindof a pain.

Intel's Z68 chipset has Smart Response Technology that marries an SSD and HDD such that hot files* end up on the SSD and cold files end up on the HDD. This chipset is on the latest iMacs, but doesn't appear to be leveraged or enabled.

Hot files are files frequently read/written and cold files which are infrequently accessed. There has been some discussion within Btrfs development to do this at a file system level, so it wouldn't depend on proprietary technology. It'd sorta be like a smarter variant of disk spanning plus caching.

*Technically it's not "files" that are cached, but logical block addresses (LBA), so it's entirely possible portions of files will be on the SSD and HDD.