Bit the Bullet... A Few Questions

[Thomas S]

Howdy!

I finally bit the bullet with regards to the Mac Pro and picked up the following on Sunday:

* Mac Pro 2x 2.8GHZ (Quad)
* 16GB OWC RAM on order
* Dual 23" Cinema Displays
* I'm going to order the 8800GT upgrade kit

Now, this is mostly for Aperture, Photoshop, FCP, and Motion with two or more of these apps open at the same time sometimes.

With that said, my concerns are with the hard drives. Right now, I'm looking at the following for the internal drive setup:

* 1x Raptor 10k 150GB for OS X & Applications
* 3x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB Drives w/ 32MB Cache combined as a concatenated array for data
* I'll be using an eSATA external enclosure (RAID 5) for backups via Time Machine but I haven't figured out what enclosure to buy just yet

I've seen statements on both sides of the Raptor issue - but are the write speeds worth the premium and the loss of space (granted, I'm probably not going to be using anywhere near 150gb for the OS & applications)?

Second, will the performance loss with a concatenated array setup via Disk Utility be noticeable? With Aperture specifically, will I notice much of a slowdown in general usage? I've seen random comments about it in this forum, but I'm looking for more concrete experiences/thoughts - it seemed like a search turned up a ton of varying viewpoints. Any experience with a similar setup & Aperture?

Finally, will Time Machine give me trouble with backing things up if I use the Terminal to move my home directories to the concatenated array? I wouldn't expect it, but I just want to make sure all bases are covered.

Any thoughts on these questions would be most appreciated.

Cheers

Tom

 

[rds]

Why concatenated? As I understand it, Using OS X concat sets, if one drive fails, you lose all your data. With this in mind, you would need external backup for all your internal data. So for a Time Machine store, you'd need at least 4TB. Not to mention that it doesn't seem worthwhile to be starting with a 3TB empty concat set.

Personally, if you are not going to use Boot Camp, I'd get 4xSamsung F1 1TB drives to strip and mirror. That'll give you 2TB internal storage, the performance of RAID 0 and redundancy. The Samsung drives (even without RAID) compete pretty well with the Raptors.