Hello my friends,
I am glad to report that the new system is finally getting together following the arrival of the Mac pro 2 weeks ago and the set up of the Promise Pegasus2 R8 32GB.
- mac pro 2013 specs: 8 core, 1GB SSD, 64 GB ram, 2xD700
- promise pegasus2 R8: 8x4TB configured in Raid6 (24TB usable)
- nas Qnap 4 drive: 4x4TB in Raid 5.
The system seems much faster per the first tests I am doing, in particular on the disk side compared to my previous NAS solutions.
A quick check with Blackmagic Disk speed tests shows:
- NAS from Mac pro 2013: write speed around 90 MB/S, read speed around 100 MB/s
- Pegasus2 from Mac pro 2013: write speed around 550 MB/S, read speed around 500 MB/s
- Internal SSD Mac pro 2013: write speed around 960 MB/S, read speed around 900 MB/s
I did try to open a few 2+ GB files in PS6 and I get open times around 5 seconds that seem aligned with the benchmark disk speed. Opening the same file from the NAS took about 25 sec.
I am glad to see these results, because the analysis of my workflow crearly shows mass storage disk access speed to be the main bottleneck in terms of time spent waiting:
- generation of raw previews,
- open/save of large files in PS,
- open/save of raw/computed files in pano softwares,
- ...
Thunderbolt does seem to deliver on its promises in terms of real world speed. It had been 6.5 years I had not changed workstation, although I had upgraded the previous mac pro little by little.
More simple tests to follow including an end to end back from a shoot till pano completion time comparison with previous setup.
Some other comments:
- Full initialization of the 24TB Raid6 partition on the Pegasus2 took nearly... 24 hours...
- By default, the pop up blocker is activated in the latest version of Safari shipping with OX 10.9, which prevents the promise utility from reporting on successful completion of the initialization process. Since the initialization does not include a partition formating, the disk can still not be seen by OSX even after a successful initialization... which led me to mistakingly think that the initialization had failed. Just a warning for Promise users.
Cheers,
Bernard