Cadkiller said:
I just checked out the Mac G5 Quad system and it seems like it can compete with the system I'm looking to get. The price of such a system is almost as much as the system I'm pricing. The amount of ram you can put in that monster is amazing. If I only could afford getting that much ram for my system (16MB's = $10,000) WOW. The only potential problems I see, are the ATI 1GB video card, the SCSI 15,000 RPM hard drive and the 320 MB controller card.
I work with very large CAD files that can get up to 100 MB's or more in size. The SCSI hard drive and controller card allow for very fast transfer rates.
Why doesn't a Mac use SCSI or at least high RPM hard drives?
Can a SATA II compete with the SCSI on tranfer rates?
Does anyone know of the tranfer speed for the SATA II?
Thanks for the replies.
1) Don't buy your RAM and hard drives from Apple. Get the stock configuration, and then install RAM and drives purchased from reputable Mac-knowledgeable third part suppliers. You'll save thousands on a fully loaded machine
2) For Consumer and professional use, SATA I 7200 RPM 8 Mb cache IS high performance. Your needs are exceptional, and it would be foolish of Apple to offer your level of performance as standard.
You can install the SATA Western Digital Raptor drives, 10,000 RPM 73 Gb or 150 Gb. These are essentially SCSI 10K drives with a SATA controller instead. SATA 1 is nominally 150 MB/s. SATA II is nominally 300 MB/s however the PowerMacs support only SATA/150, although you can install third party SATA controller cards. The raw numbers however do not mean much -- performance is highly dependent on the nature of the workload and the data transfers. See
http://www.storagereview.com for in depth discussions of drive performance.
3) I think you may have missed the salient point of a previous post -- the PowerMac Dual and Quad G5 machines do not and never will run Windows natively. They have PowerPC processors, not Intel processors. You will have to wait until later this year or early 2007 for the top of the line machines to go Intel.