Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: dgberg on February 07, 2012, 06:20:49 pm
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Only 5 years with a D2Xs and my 4 internal hard drives are filling up.
My IT guy is coming out in a week to update my OS from 10.5.8 to 10.6.7 so Lightroom 4 will work.
At the same time he offered to go over my entire system and clean things up.
Trying to decide what to do with hard drives as I am about full up and this would be a great time to update the drives.
Presently I have 2-500gb and 2 -1tb. The tb's are set up as a raid.
Would it make more sense to just leave these 4 drives alone and get a large external system?
I have a NEX 7 and D800 on the way and they will chew up space big time.
Drobo S?
Suggestions?
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since you are upgrading your O/S, why not get a 256-320GB SSD for O/S (tuck it under your optical drive) and 4 3TB's in RAID-10 giving you 6TB useable storage?
Put the 500GB O/S in a firewire enclosure for alternative boot / sanity check - after file transfer, use the other for offsite storage.....
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since you are upgrading your O/S, why not get a 256-320GB SSD for O/S (tuck it under your optical drive)
+1 This is what I have done. Makes a major difference!
http://eshop.macsales.com/owcpages/multimount/
Then add one of these:
http://firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2me4-e/
and connect either of these:
http://firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2eEN4/
http://firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-5pm/
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Suggestions?
I agree with doing SSDs for boot. I've gotten several external drive systems from MacGurus (http://www.macgurus.com/). The guys there are really helpful. My main drive setup is the 6 bay enclosure (http://www.macgurus.com/store/ecom-prodshow/BurlyDualPM.html) set up as RAID 0 for speed. I have a duplicate system sitting next to it which gets backed up every night. My 3rd online backup has been to a Drobo Pro but I've been having rebooting problems and it currently won't mount. So, I just ordered a 5 bay RAID 5 Firewire drive with 3TB drives from Micronet. Haven't gotten it yet so no feedback but I think I'm done with Drobo...
I bought this base setup just before SSDs got practical...my internal drives are 15K SAS drives arrayed with a Mac RAID card. It's very fast but if I were to redo it, I would switch to SSDs for the internals...
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Very helpful thanks to all.
Understand most of this but will let my Mac guy read this thread.
Have to do a little research to see where the costs are.
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According to the Google White Paper on HDs, useful life on drives peaks roughly at three years then the failure rate starts to catch up on them.
I've been making a point to double-up on my drives and mirror the files "knuckle-head" style yearly, them stashing the back-up off site. What I mean by that is to simply drag the files to both drives once they have been processed and ready to archive.
The drives are in a pair of eSata jbod boxes and each is hot-swapable as needed. No need to take the MacPro apart to pull the drives!
On my older files that once were on several 250GB drives, I consolidated to a newer TB drive with room to spare, then a couple of years ago, brought them forward to an even newer drive. I now have two back-up drives along with a stack of DVDs.
I'd say, replace all your drives with faster, larger and (somewhat) cheaper drives with your updated system and save the hassles of simply grafting 10.7 over 10.6.
For 2010 and 2011, I was able to save it all on a 2TB drive and a dupe that will now be stashed with the other back-up drives. A couple of weeks ago, I took all the drives in the archives and fired them up to see if they still functioned (they did!). For 2012 with a couple of D800s on the way, I'm going to start on a 1.5TB drive I stocked up on last year before the Thai floods and see how it goes. I'm waiting for the drives to come done again and will probably settle on 3TB drives to take me through the end of 2013 with the new, bloated NEF files.
Hopefully, with only 4 fps motor rate, I'll be shooting a little slower and since I still have a few DX lenses, I'll simply shoot to the DX crop! We'll see how it goes...
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Dan,
I'm not sure I would go with SSDs for everything yet, they scare me, however I do have them holding my OS on my various systems and laptops.
1 - SSD for OS
1 - SSD for programs
Get all the latest updates, make sure it's 100% stable and then Ghost both drives, this will save you lots of time in the future.
Install a couple Raptors or similar fast 10,000 rpm drives or preferably ditch the Mac and go with a PC installing SAS
Don't be fuzzy about installing SCSI. :-) I believe you can get a SAS card for a MAC and install SAS, haven't done it.
Install a back-up external enclosure.
You are done....
Just an FYI, I have been building systems since 1998 and haven't had a SCSI drive fail yet. Though all drives will eventually fail, SCSI has been proven to be the most reliable, I guess that's why banks use them.
Garry
Ps, I treat my photos differently, I have a folder just for prints and they are ranked 1-10, I also burn these onto DVD
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Peter Krogh has a very good book on workflow best practices, called The DAM book, or the Digital Asset Management book. Also, he has a site with most of the info which he did for the smithsonian, or other museum, but I can't remember the url.
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Just an FYI, I have been building systems since 1998 and haven't had a SCSI drive fail yet. Though all drives will eventually fail, SCSI has been proven to be the most reliable, I guess that's why banks use them.
I've had SCSI drives fail...SCSI is no magic bullet. All HDs fail, it's only a question of when. The odds are, it'll be the one drive that ISN'T back up that will fail. That's my experience...if you have it backed up, the life of the HD seems to be extended...
Personally, I do a triple (3X) backup on working files and regular 2x backups on OS & Apps...
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I've had SCSI drives fail...SCSI is no magic bullet. All HDs fail, it's only a question of when. The odds are, it'll be the one drive that ISN'T back up that will fail. That's my experience...if you have it backed up, the life of the HD seems to be extended...
Personally, I do a triple (3X) backup on working files and regular 2x backups on OS & Apps...
This is so true, it's prophetic!
In fact, just this week end while going through my STACKS of hard drives (including many PATA), my ONE non-duplicate drive holding some 250 gig of media gave me the "whirrrrr.... click click click" that I know so well as the death throes of a failed drive. A seagate 250gb 7200.10 sata with 3 month left of it's 5 year warranty! It has been sitting in a drawer for perhaps a year untouched. I thought at the time what could go wrong, it's not even PLUGGED IN! OS won't even recognize it. OFF TO SEAGATE it went this morning.
Fate is a cruel mistress! Having said that, if you don't have OFF SITE backups, you are still at risk. Fire and theft are just as cruel!
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People, please read, I said
"Just an FYI, I have been building systems since 1998 and haven't had a SCSI drive fail yet. Though all drives will eventually fail, SCSI has been proven to be the most reliable, I guess that's why banks use them."
I have had many non-SCSI drives fail, the point here being, SCSI has a much more reliable longevity record than non-scsi. They aren't a "magic bullet" whatever that means, but if you want speed and a proven drive that will last, SCSI is the answer. And I do agree it will be the drive that isn't backed up that will fail first. My first IMac purchase I didn't back up because I had the mistaken belief that Apple computers were built using "better" components and therefore more reliable than other computers (except mine) I was wrong and it took me a lot of effort to get back all my data. As I stated, ALL hard drives fail, but as it stands today of all the drives we are using SCSI has the best reliability. I'm still using SCSI drives from 1999. It's just a suggestion from somebody who has used and installed more than 2 SCSI drives :-).
Garry
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SCSI what? SCSI Wide? SCSI LVD? Ultra 160/320? SAS?
SCSI is a drive interface specification - it has *nothing* to do with drive design per se....
I'll readily agree that enterprise spec drives (basically vibration tolerance - extended feedback of head vs: platter position below it) are desirable, the fact remains that today's sata/sas drives are more reliable than ever.
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"SCSI what? SCSI Wide? SCSI LVD? Ultra 160/320? SAS?
SCSI is a drive interface specification - it has *nothing* to do with drive design per se....
I'll readily agree that enterprise spec drives (basically vibration tolerance - extended feedback of head vs: platter position below it) are desirable, the fact remains that today's sata/sas drives are more reliable than ever."
John,
Read my post again GEEZ, I mean you seem awfully perspicacious to me, but read it again. Also, SCSI is NOT a drive interface specification! There are many different types of SCSI interface and not just for "drives"
And, we in the industry put the SCSI always as the Latter. Low Voltage Differential came out as Ultra 2 SCSI or LVD SCSI. get it?
"Install a couple Raptors or similar fast 10,000 rpm drives or preferably ditch the Mac and go with a PC installing SAS
Don't be fuzzy about installing SCSI. :-) I believe you can get a SAS card for a MAC and install SAS, haven't done it."
Did I mention Wide, Ultra Wide, Ultra2, Ultra3, Ultra 320, Ultra 640, FC, SSA, SSA 40, FC-AL 1GB, FC-AL 2GB,? NO, I didn't, I specifically said SAS
What do YOU call a SCSI drive? There have been many different interfaces over the years. What does the acronym SAS stand for? What's that last word? I have never met anybody in the industry who doesn't refer to a SCSI (any interface) hard drive as such, so if you are just being pugnacious, good for you.! SAS stands for Serial Attached SCSI DUH (vs. the older Parallel)
Yes, I also have SCSI CD Rom / Writers and Scanners, etc. but for this conversation we are talking HDs,
And believe it or not being a SCSI drive does have something to do with the way it is built, per se... (Even if we are talking about just the connector :-) ) And I'll stick by my original comment, SCSI drives are much more reliable than IDE, ATA, SATA (non-SCSI) drives and that is probably the reason why the banking industry uses them as well as a lot of other mission critical applications. I do agree that SCSI drives do fail, all HDs will fail, I stated that before, however as somebody who has used and built (for 1000s of others) countless systems using both SCSI and the non-SCSI variety, I can say unequivocally that SCSI drives are much more reliable. Plextor drives will fail, I haven't had one fail. Crucial memory will fail, I haven't had any go bad. I won't dispute the fact that every mechanical device will eventually fail.. WOW
Garry
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NO, I didn't, I specifically said SAS
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I can say unequivocally that SCSI drives are much more reliable.
Plextor drives will fail, I haven't had one fail.
1) Please learn to quote properly.
2) Are you aware that the SAS interface is much closer to SATA than to SCSI ? You can even mix drives on the same controllers
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0740.html
SAS has several attractive features, such as a more advanced high level controlling protocol, longer cables, direct backplane connections, etc... It is not intrinsically more reliable than SAS
Seagate, for example, offers the same drive in both interface, with the same ratings
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/enterprise-hard-drives/constellation-es/
3) Plextor? I have a dozen failed ones in my trash hardware closet. If you want to pay shipping, I can send you one of those apparently extremely rare collectors.
4) "banks use SAS drives" as a reliability argument? That's a new one...
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And I'll stick by my original comment, SCSI drives are much more reliable than IDE, ATA, SATA (non-SCSI) drives and that is probably the reason why the banking industry uses them as well as a lot of other mission critical applications.
I think a lot of the question regarding reliability comes down to the ratings and the warrantees the HD makers give. Most enterprise level HDs come with 5 year warrantees. Some lesser HDs with three year and many/most external HDs in enclosures are repackaged OEM drives with 1 or 2 year warrantees.
The other major factor is heat....heat kills drives. A lot of the cheaper external drive enclosures don't do a great job of heat dispersal. Many rely on passive heat radiators instead of fans. If you have a fast high RPM drive in an enclosure that can't keep the drive cool, you're gonna have really shortened drive life.
The recent drive shortage and industry consolidation is taking a toll. There's talk that many drive makers are going to be reducing their warrantees–which cost them money. I wouldn't even consider buying a drive that didn't have a 3 year warrantee but have made it a practice in the past to only buy drives that have 5 year warrantees. Those specs always cost more but in my experience, they're worth it. But they are harder to find these days...
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I learned to read well before I went to college and I do matriculate from a very fine university. I don't even need " " to let me know who said what when, but I use them as a point of reference for those who didn't retain what they just read. If " " are unacceptable to you, perhaps go back to school.....
As far as the drives. If it were me, I'd personally use Seagate Cheetah 15K drives either using a RAID or not, plenty fast by themselves.
"Are you aware that the SAS interface is much closer to SATA than to SCSI ? You can even mix drives on the same controllers"
Seriously, you aren't worth my time to try and educate you.....
"banks use SAS drives" as a reliability argument? That's a new one...
If you are going to quote somebody, please quote them accurately....
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get the best drives you can afford, have a backup policy in action.
expect all electronics to fail eventually, its only a question of when not if. i tend to agree with schewe, get th drives with 5 year warranty and replace them after 3 years of duty.
5 year warranty drives are usually enterprise drives, or drives the manufactor consider better then average - and they do come at a premium.
however most importantly - have an current and active backup running, by active i mean oe that backs up frequently (frequency - depends on workload), in some if not most cases have multiple backup sets and rotate them.
in the end consider the value of what asset you are trying to protect, and place the value/cost of your backup cost based on the asset value. no point spending $10k on something thats worth $100
So to the OP, get 4x Western digital RE4 drives, or similar Seagate or Hitachi, or 4x enterpris SSD's, yes you are going to be paying alot for this, but you also have to pay alot to recover failed or faulty drives
all the best
Henrik
PS: to the scsi discussion - back when scsi was king - the manufactors build them for the most to last aka enterprise class, but you could also get not so good quality scsi disks
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"Are you aware that the SAS interface is much closer to SATA than to SCSI ? You can even mix drives on the same controllers"
Seriously, you aren't worth my time to try and educate you.....
That's OK, don't feel guilty. I lost interest in SCSI after having issues with a couple of multi-threaded I/O SCRIPTS program I wrote for a Symbios controller.
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I learned to read well before I went to college and I do matriculate from a very fine university.
My emphasis.
Sorry, but when you make a point of appealing to your own authority (i.e. your level of education), typos such as that really epitomise irony :-)
Jokes aside (and it was, please accept it as so), the reason for quoting that uses the formatting built into the forums is because a lot of people are often reading a lot of forums on a lot of sites and spread over a considerable amount of time. You might remember what has been written recently, as I suspect do most people, but others who are following or comming to the thread later may not have that advantage.
It's easy to do, and it helps to improve the level of communication. If you don't want to do it, no one is going to force you, but it's a reasonable request and hardly worthy of the "but I'm erudite and highly edumackated" response.
Just sayin'.
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"Sorry, but when you make a point of appealing to your own authority (i.e. your level of education), typos such as that really epitomise irony :-)"
I have no typos in the quote and actually it isn't ironic, but again, I consider the source... Or are you referring to your "typos"?
These puerile discussions are so ridiculous it just simply makes me laugh.
It doesn't matter how many threads you are participating in, if you are reading this then you should know who wrote what.
"That's OK, don't feel guilty. I lost interest in SCSI after having issues with a couple of multi-threaded I/O SCRIPTS program I wrote for a Symbios controller."
I'm glad you lost interest, always leave the complex problems for the experts to solve... :-)
I suppose one should extrapolate from this "discussion" we should all buy a Hyundai, it has a longer warranty than any other vehicle sold in the USA, it must be somehow better? You do realize warranties are a part of marketing and not necessarily indicative of how long an item will last? Why replace a hard drive if the performance is still there and you have another back up?
Good day, LOL
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Good thread. Interesting read.
Although hard drives have a guaranteed future as a failed device, I do appreciate how wonderful they have served us all. I still have boxes of Kodachrome slides in what appears to be in total organization – only to discover chaos when searching for a keepsake. We have all made the digital transformation and fully realize the technology comes with a new set of problems.
Back to Dan, the OP. I too look forward to getting the Nikon D800E and the new problem of giant raw files. Like so many in this thread, I have loved using RAID 5 SCSI drives through the years as my server. And yes, they do fail – even the enterprise drives. Once again, with a RAID 5, just replace the failed drive and rebuild the volume. Nothing lost but a little time and money.
But now I am hoping to find a less costly drive array for my new server. The WD RE4 drives do appear to be a good choice and perhaps with a LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i. Not sure, but SATA drives over the SAS, for storage size and costs, seem to be the better direction these days for photography.
Like everyone else, would love to use SSDs. The result would be awesome speed. But in 2012, I wonder how long that would stay online. The cost would be problematic but feasible with consumer grade drives. The reliability of long term storage reduces this option as a solution currently. SSDs are clearly the future for us all.
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I suppose one should extrapolate from this "discussion" we should all buy a Hyundai, it has a longer warranty than any other vehicle sold in the USA, it must be somehow better? You do realize warranties are a part of marketing and not necessarily indicative of how long an item will last? Why replace a hard drive if the performance is still there and you have another back up?
Actually, if you understood the way drive makers test their components and lots, you would understand that some drives meet or exceed (some times by a lot) the specs...those drives have a larger statistical likelihood to match up with the increased MTBF of enterprise drives which require better long term life and be less likely to fail.
The makers pull these high testing drives to the side and package them as being "better" than average and charge a premium for them. I'm willing to pay a higher price for higher speced, longer lived drives because statistically, they are less likely to fail. The old adage, you get what you pay for comes to mind.
HDs are a commodity based business with really, REALLY small margins. If the HD makers want to stay in the biz, they must make a profit. They know that users who are interested in better spec will pay while cheap-ass price conscience only buyers always buy the lowest price stuff, even if the stuff will fail very early in the life cycle...even if in the long run the cheap stuff costs more money and puts data at risk.
YMMV...
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"Sorry, but when you make a point of appealing to your own authority (i.e. your level of education), typos such as that really epitomise irony :-)"
I have no typos in the quote and actually it isn't ironic, but again, I consider the source... Or are you referring to your "typos"?
These puerile discussions are so ridiculous it just simply makes me laugh.
It doesn't matter how many threads you are participating in, if you are reading this then you should know who wrote what.
Really? No typos by you? I even marked it in bold to help you.
Let's try again:
I learned to read well before I went to college and I do matriculate from a very fine university.
You used "learned". This is an adjective and participle and in your usage as it applies to the verb "read", is past tense. You then used "do matriculate". Do is a verb in your usage and is present tense. You have mixed tenses. This is either a typo, or your grammatical construction is flawed. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and presumed that you had made a typo. If you wish to insist that you did not, and that what you typed is what you intended, then the error is more significant. Either way, my original point stands that if you wish to appeal to your own authority it pays to avoid making mistakes whilst so doing. Your mistake while attempting to assert your own erudition is ironic. Indeed, since you attempted to highly quality your education by mentioning a "very fine university" it is very ironic.
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Farmer,
I'll reiterate, there aren't any typos, I made a minor grammatical error (I mean a very significant error LOL), I used the word do instead of did. WOW, you are a genius for catching that. I did catch it, but I wanted to see how smart you were and you obviously are brilliant. LOL As far as the rest of it, you missed it completely, but you stay on top of do & did... LOL (hint: think forest and trees)
"Indeed, since you attempted to highly quality your education by mentioning a "very fine university" it is very ironic." WTF LOL
Jeff,
I do have a firm grasp on how HDs are assembled and tested, I also have a firm grasp on why manufacturers and retailers use warranties as selling tools. Most companies if not all wouldn't give a warranty if they weren't forced into it. Apple's warranty is lousy (one year limited warranty), my hard drive went south at about 14 months, but if you buy one at the retail level it's 3-5 years. Why doesn't Apple have a 2 year warranty? Obviously they don't need to, they give the min warranty they have to. One reason why I won't buy anymore Apple products.
I don't always agree with "You get what you pay for". I have an $80K SUV here that I'm not sure I got what I paid for, I have over $10K worth of Apple garbage next to me....though I have about a dozen Seagate Cheetah 15K SCSI drives next to me still working :-) Now that I think about it, I still use my Epson 1280, that has to be 10+ years old :-) That's old....
"HDs are a commodity based business with really, REALLY small margins."
Jeff, which manufacturing business (in the disposable USA) isn't a commodity business with tight margins? Do we build anything to last a very long time? Cars are built on tight margins, so are appliances, furniture and cabinetry, etc. We can't manufacturer much in this country because of tight margins.. Most products seem to be a commodity in today's world.. Sometimes it really bites us in the ass, think CD-Rs
I do know what a commodity is.. :-) And I'm not sure that all HDs fall into the category of "commodity". I believe that most products manufactured for the mass market could be considered a commodity.
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"qualify" - it was a typo. See how easy it is to admit without spruiking some BS excuse?
Grow up, mate. That's best advice I can give you.
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"See how easy it is to admit without spruiking some BS excuse?"
You originally stated I made a typo, I hadn't, you then correctly gave the option of either a typo and or a grammatical error, I'm always honest and I confessed and admitted to making a "very significant" grammatical error! There were no long stories or excuses, I simply said I didn't make a typo, it was much worse than that. :-)
"Grow up, mate. That's best advice I can give you."
I didn't start this discussion, I simply gave advice based upon my experience and knowledge regarding hard drives. I never claimed SCSI hard drives don't fail, quite the contrary, I said all hard drives will fail, however the SCSI drives have a much better reliability record, which coincides with my own experience. I never said SCSI drives were a "Magic Bullet", they aren't. I'm simply amazed at how quickly people will jump all over a post / person on this forum. And then you want to start a war over my inadvertent use of the word do instead of did and I should "grow up" isn't that the pot calling............? LOL
If I feel I can help, I will write what my experience has been.
Garry
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Much of what I have read suggests that the Hitachi drives are very reliable, esp the 5400 rpm drives which generate less heat than the 7200 rpm drives. Hitachi drives are used in OWC and G-technology brand products from which I have had good service.
Any discussion of backup solutions needs to also include other hazards than simply hard drive failure, such as fire or theft. I think an external backup stored off the premises has to be part of your backup plan.
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"Any discussion of backup solutions needs to also include other hazards than simply hard drive failure, such as fire or theft. I think an external backup stored off the premises has to be part of your backup plan."
I can't argue with offsite backup, however I simply suggest on premise fireproof enclosure such as a safe. It's not terribly difficult to make an enclosure in the house that can withstand a fire.
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The only problem with commercial "fireproof" enclosures is that they are rated for paper (200C / ~400F). The only documentation I could find for hard drives was from an older Hitachi Spec sheet for a Deskstar - (non operating 70C / ~160F). Thats going to be one hell of a firesafe!!!! :)
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I built my "bunker" in the basement out of reinforced concrete double door and then I'm thinking this should work.
https://iosafe.com/products-soloPRO-buy
Garry
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You forgot the SAS drive ;D
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Quite alot of action since I was here last.
So glad to see no blood spattered on the screen. ;)
I should have mentioned the subject of speed in my first thread,but did not.
System presently is Mac 10.5.8,Duo Core and 10 Gb Ram. The new os will be 64 bit and how much will that help?
Autopano Giga,Photoshop CS5,Epson 750 scanning with Silverfast and Lightroom 3.6 open slow and run slower yet.
The OS and all applications are presently on a 500 GB hard drive and take up 450GB of space. (Yes I know 90% is bad,thats why we are fixing things.)
Since were ripping and tearing things apart and there will be plenty of space with the new drives.(4 internal 1 tb drives and an external 3tb.)
With regards to all my photo software and OS what kind of placement would give me better operational speeds? 2 of the 1tb drives will be available.
Just to add our corporate IT guy is pretty sharp but is not into photography. Not sure if that matters or not.
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I would definitely go SSD. I've now moved all my machines to a SSD OS/application drive. It does require a bit of discipline and cleanup but was really worth the trouble. My 2010 Core I7 MacBook Pro had become intolerably slow after the Lion upgrade: now it's fast again. I did the backup/swap drive/restore backup procedure so the speed increase can't really be attributed to a fresh install. I went for the 256GB 830 serie samsung SSD (other machines use Intel ones) which arguably is overkill since the 2010 MacBook Pro only has a 3 GBps SATA controller but the cost differential with a 470 serie was small. There's a 512GB model if you can't get rid of enough stuff to make it fit in smaller sizes. Most of my data sits on a NAS that can reliably and consistently deliver 90 MB/sec. Not top of the line, but very accceptable even for video tinkering.
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64bit will help a lot, Dan, since you seem to process some large images - full access to all that RAM should help significantly.
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Quite abit of action since I was here last.
So glad to see no blood spattered on the screen. ;)
Have fun with it!
pc / mac == sharks / blood in the water == crowded movie theater / yelling "fire" ......
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My choice for working fast with 36MP 16 bit PSD files would be:
buy a New Macpro ( if it comes) or PC with a fast processor + 16 or more GIG Ram
and apart from that:
Use a SSD for the system 100 GB is plenty in my case ( and i have one )
Use a Raid0 SSD ( 2x 240gig) setup for the work that you actually work on . so saving and opening is really fast (+ combined with the faster processor)
Use a 2 GB HD for your work to store when finished.
Use a 3GB HD for Backup ( Timemachine) ( have two so you can dig back some months- store the other one outside your house)
Find a way to also save your backup outside your house( online backup)
and
save your PSD files without compression if you like to make opening and saving a lot faster (plugin)
( buy a good quality SSD!)
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So what is the breakdown if you have 1 drive for your OS and another for your applications?
Or does your OS and most of your applications go on 1 drive and just PS5 and Lightroom 4 go on another?
Want to have this guy set this up right and not sure he knows either.
At least he made no mention of SSD drives.
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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.
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Perfect,thanks.
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;)
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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...
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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
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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.