Well here's my first post - even though I've been following Mac Rumors daily for some years from the UK I never posted till now!
So, I am finally expecting my new MacPro setup to arrive tomorrow (Fri - guess the girlfriend will not see much of me this weekend!). My first ever Mac was a IIci, then a iMac 300Mhz Tangerine, currently a 20" G5 iMac and now for a proper computer
:
Specs:
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
2GB - to be replaced with: 8 x 2GB=16GB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3
320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
One 16x SuperDrive
AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi)
Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mac OS
2x Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM S300 32MB
2x Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP Monitors
Epson V750 Scanner
Canon PIXMA MP850 All-in-One A4 Printer
Edirol MA-15D Stereo Micro Monitor speakers
Software
Aperture 2
Final Cut Studio 2
Iwork
Vmware Fusion
Windows Vista
Bento
1. I have a question about how to best organise (for speed) the Applications and the respective data folders. Will I get better performance if I have the data files stored on the same hard drive as the applications? I will mainly be doing Aperture, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro video editing and I planned to install all my apps on the 320GB drive and then all the data on the 2 x 1TB Seagate drives. This way if I have to hand the machine in for repairs etc I can remove and keep hold of my data on the 2 x 1TB drives. (I hope not to have any tech issues but my current iMac 20" G5 was a new swap out from Apple after I got through 2 machines (hard drive went twice and mainboard once).
2. Also I am thinking about stripping the data across the two 1TB drives for increased performance (RAID 0?) but am not decided if I want to take the greater risk of one drive failure leading to complete data loss! I understand that the Mac OSX has this feature in software - correct? Does it have the option to actually duplicate the data automatically (and with minimal/no performance loss) across the two drives hence having a backup drive inbuilt? I have an external Western Digital Studio 1TB firewire 800 drive that I will be using for Time Machine backups.
3. I bought VMFusion & Vista 32bit and was thinking of using an old LaCie 120GB firewire drive to have as my PC (urgh!) only drive. Can this work as an external or should I remove it and place it into one of the drive bays?
I appreciate that this is a bit of a long post but any advise would be much appreciated.
Also I believe that I will need to install the Firmware update (v3?) but will the software updater pick this up and download it?
Also any other advice you wan to share about what I need to download/install to get the most from this MacPro would be much appreciated.
Thanks all.
Fulz
"we shall fight them in the fields, we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them..." heck let's stop all this fighting cause it's giving me a bloody headache!!!
So, I am finally expecting my new MacPro setup to arrive tomorrow (Fri - guess the girlfriend will not see much of me this weekend!). My first ever Mac was a IIci, then a iMac 300Mhz Tangerine, currently a 20" G5 iMac and now for a proper computer
:Specs:
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
2GB - to be replaced with: 8 x 2GB=16GB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3
320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
One 16x SuperDrive
AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi)
Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mac OS
2x Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM S300 32MB
2x Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP Monitors
Epson V750 Scanner
Canon PIXMA MP850 All-in-One A4 Printer
Edirol MA-15D Stereo Micro Monitor speakers
Software
Aperture 2
Final Cut Studio 2
Iwork
Vmware Fusion
Windows Vista
Bento
1. I have a question about how to best organise (for speed) the Applications and the respective data folders. Will I get better performance if I have the data files stored on the same hard drive as the applications? I will mainly be doing Aperture, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro video editing and I planned to install all my apps on the 320GB drive and then all the data on the 2 x 1TB Seagate drives. This way if I have to hand the machine in for repairs etc I can remove and keep hold of my data on the 2 x 1TB drives. (I hope not to have any tech issues but my current iMac 20" G5 was a new swap out from Apple after I got through 2 machines (hard drive went twice and mainboard once).
2. Also I am thinking about stripping the data across the two 1TB drives for increased performance (RAID 0?) but am not decided if I want to take the greater risk of one drive failure leading to complete data loss! I understand that the Mac OSX has this feature in software - correct? Does it have the option to actually duplicate the data automatically (and with minimal/no performance loss) across the two drives hence having a backup drive inbuilt? I have an external Western Digital Studio 1TB firewire 800 drive that I will be using for Time Machine backups.
3. I bought VMFusion & Vista 32bit and was thinking of using an old LaCie 120GB firewire drive to have as my PC (urgh!) only drive. Can this work as an external or should I remove it and place it into one of the drive bays?
I appreciate that this is a bit of a long post but any advise would be much appreciated.
Also I believe that I will need to install the Firmware update (v3?) but will the software updater pick this up and download it?
Also any other advice you wan to share about what I need to download/install to get the most from this MacPro would be much appreciated.
Thanks all.
Fulz
"we shall fight them in the fields, we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them..." heck let's stop all this fighting cause it's giving me a bloody headache!!!