I just bought , still awaiting delivery , a 2019 mac Pro 7,1 28 core with 768 Gb RAM .
This is to update from my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 2.8GHZ 8 core .
Due to the new machine not having any Firewire ports I'm looking ideally for two PCIe cards - one to give me four FW-800 ports , ideally buffered from each other , so that I can connect my G-Technology G-RAID and G-Drive units of which I currently have around 25 daisy-chained off the one FW-800 port on the back of my Mac - the drawback of that is that to access a drive near the end of the chain I need to have all of them powered on - so if I can get a card with four buffered outputs I could have four shorter chains .
I also want FW-400 separately as I currently have three edit decks - JVC-BR-HD50 and Sony HVR-M15 , plus a PDW-F70 all of which connect via FW-400 for ingesting content and I currently plug and unplug from the front panel socket ; the front FW-800 socket is used for my G-Drive and G-Raid Mini portable drives .
I already have two eSATA cards for my G-SPEED eS arrays , of which I have five - one being the Sonnet Tempo card , and another being a HighPoint card that came with one of the Arrays , except I have to have them in separate computers as there aren't enough card slots to go round in the older computers ! I can't believe that Apple now sell computers with NO expansion slots !
I don't really want to start using thunderbolt adaptors for this as I want to keep the two top Thunderbolt ports to hopefully run external enclosures for my two Blu-Ray writer drives , I have yet to even look for enclosures , as the only other option is to keep one or more of my older mac Pros hanging on my network just to write discs ...
This is to update from my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 2.8GHZ 8 core .
Due to the new machine not having any Firewire ports I'm looking ideally for two PCIe cards - one to give me four FW-800 ports , ideally buffered from each other , so that I can connect my G-Technology G-RAID and G-Drive units of which I currently have around 25 daisy-chained off the one FW-800 port on the back of my Mac - the drawback of that is that to access a drive near the end of the chain I need to have all of them powered on - so if I can get a card with four buffered outputs I could have four shorter chains .
I also want FW-400 separately as I currently have three edit decks - JVC-BR-HD50 and Sony HVR-M15 , plus a PDW-F70 all of which connect via FW-400 for ingesting content and I currently plug and unplug from the front panel socket ; the front FW-800 socket is used for my G-Drive and G-Raid Mini portable drives .
I already have two eSATA cards for my G-SPEED eS arrays , of which I have five - one being the Sonnet Tempo card , and another being a HighPoint card that came with one of the Arrays , except I have to have them in separate computers as there aren't enough card slots to go round in the older computers ! I can't believe that Apple now sell computers with NO expansion slots !
I don't really want to start using thunderbolt adaptors for this as I want to keep the two top Thunderbolt ports to hopefully run external enclosures for my two Blu-Ray writer drives , I have yet to even look for enclosures , as the only other option is to keep one or more of my older mac Pros hanging on my network just to write discs ...