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Fastest Mac Pro on Earth

300Billion

300Billion

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 7, 2011
13
0
Hello all,

I wanted to share my hardware config and see if anyone has done this as well.

I just bought a MAC PRO base model.

I added 8GB RAM
I added 2 60GB SSD's drives and RAID0 them together
I use the included 1TB drive for my data
I added a 2TB Drive for Time Machine.

The result is ridiculous - its boots in 12 seconds and you name it, it does it fast - I mean fast.

I write this post because I dont see anyone else doing this?
I see lots of you spending extra money for the 3.33Westmere or dual CPU's or adding 4 7200RPM drives and raiding that way.

Am I missing something?
 
that sounds like a very good machine!

you should post some pictures :)

the 2x60GB SSDs isnt really the fastest configuration you can get, but its mighty quick!
 
2x60GB SSD mind you they each read/write 270/280 Striped in RAID0 is the speed part.
I did that do i could best use the other 2 slots for data and then backup without worry about failing drives etc.
I still have an external 1TB drive that I keep in the safe

anyone else have simular hardware they want to share?
 
Depends what kind of speed you need. Faster CPU provides more number crushing power so a 12-core Mac Pro would run circles around your Mac Pro in encoding or rendering tasks for instance. Faster GPU will help with graphics intensive apps like gaming though it might help with video editing and 3D stuff as well (especially if OpenCL or CUDA is supported).

SSDs or other fast storage only help when disk access is needed, i.e. in booting and app launching mainly. It doesn't help when raw processing power is needed
 
300Billion said:
2x60GB SSD mind you they each read/write 270/280 Striped in RAID0 is the speed part.
I did that do i could best use the other 2 slots for data and then backup without worry about failing drives etc.
I still have an external 1TB drive that I keep in the safe

anyone else have simular hardware they want to share?
Click to expand...

its still not very fast compared to what you could get from other, more advanced configurations.
 
Hi guys I completely agree with the 12core vs 8 or even 4 - RAW CPU power computes. the SSD's read/wite

This 2.8Quad still does well for rendering but its the daily tasks and navigation, moving, loading data that I find (most of us) do all day and that takes so much time. With these SSD's in RAID0 it makes the daily use of this beast Xtimes more enjoyable and impressive

I come from an iMac27 and the comparison is clear (must have a lot to do with the 1GB vid card for rendering)

The SSD's improve over all performance of the MP just wondering if anyone else has tried similar configs and their feedback
 
300Billion said:
Hello all,

I wanted to share my hardware config and see if anyone has done this as well.

I just bought a MAC PRO base model.

I added 8GB RAM
I added 2 60GB SSD's drives and RAID0 them together
I use the included 1TB drive for my data
I added a 2TB Drive for Time Machine.

The result is ridiculous - its boots in 12 seconds and you name it, it does it fast - I mean fast.

I write this post because I dont see anyone else doing this?
I see lots of you spending extra money for the 3.33Westmere or dual CPU's or adding 4 7200RPM drives and raiding that way.

Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

Is this really the fastest Mac Pro on earth? Because my MBP boots from dead cold to desktop in 11 or 12seconds. Gotta love 'em SSD's!
 
Everything really
Video Editing in FCExpress and iMovie
Paralells for Windows so I can run CPU intensive applications not avail on MAC (stock market things)

photoshop/fireworks editing huge pics

so CPU power is important while moving stuff around is equally if not more important.

no games
 
300Billion said:
Everything really
Video Editing in FCExpress and iMovie
Paralells for Windows so I can run CPU intensive applications not avail on MAC (stock market things)

photoshop/fireworks editing huge pics

so CPU power is important while moving stuff around is equally if not more important.

no games
Click to expand...

wouldnt you want to use BootCamp for CPU intensive windows applications? because virtualisation software is not very good for power requirements.

the SSDs in RAID0 do appear to be a good idea for you. nice choice.
 
DoFoT9 said:
wouldnt you want to use BootCamp for CPU intensive windows applications? because virtualisation software is not very good for power requirements.

the SSDs in RAID0 do appear to be a good idea for you. nice choice.
Click to expand...

Oddly enough I have not considered bootcamp....
Often I need to leave the WINDOWS system running for days to collect data (not crunching it) so If I had bootcamp its one or the other running not both.

ye syou are right parallels is convenient but in no way a replacement
 
You can easily put twenty SSD's in there and make a large striped array out of it, but the question is whether this this practical?

In fact, the OS won't benefit much from a striped SSD array. It isn't really faster than with a single SSD.

And at any rate, boot times to determine the speed of the machine? :confused:

There are way to many parameters that affect the boot time. Amount of hard drives, extension cards, RAM, OS version...
 
DoFoT9 said:
HAHAHAHAH! funny.

imagine with 4xRAID0 SSDs :D
Click to expand...

You would only get ~660MB/s because that's the limitation of the chipset or something (I remember Nano saying this) :( So even if you added third SSD, you couldn't take full advantage of it and fourth one would be more or less useless in terms of performance. A RAID card or PCIe SATA card might solve the bottleneck though ;)
 
DoFoT9 said:
one optical slot? but then how do you plug in the other hdds? arent there only 5 slots on the mobo?
Click to expand...

Hellhammer said:
You would only get ~660MB/s because that's the limitation of the chipset or something (I remember Nano saying this) :( So even if you added third SSD, you couldn't take full advantage of it and fourth one would be more or less useless in terms of performance. A RAID card or PCIe SATA card might solve the bottleneck though ;)
Click to expand...
correct, its a chipset/bus limitation. forgot about that :p

RAID card would help, but even they have limitations.
 
A Mac Pro is not "the fastest one on earth" because you can load data from the disk relatively fast.

"Fast" can also refer to computational power or graphical computational power.



2x SSD's is not the fastest setup either, I believe PCI-E SSD's are way faster (and expensive)
 
philipma1957 said:
owc is developing ssd's built into a pci e card. they claim 4GB/s speed for burst and over 1.2GB/s as throughtput. i posted a link somewhere on this site. I would think it will cost more then the MacPro does!
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. OCZ has these drives available for about two years now and they're getting cheaper and cheaper. A 160GB RevoDrive X2 is about 550€ and is good for 740MB/s reads and 690MB/s writes.
The only disadvantage of these drives is, they don't boot OS X. OCZ claimed to be working on that issue, though.
Hopefully we will see some bootable PCIe SSD's soon. SATA 6.0Gb/s doesn't really cut it, software raiding SSD's in the Pro has too much limitations (throughput limit = limited amount of total drives), as does hardware raiding (no sleep support).
 
philipma1957 said:
owc is developing ssd's built into a pci e card. they claim 4GB/s speed for burst and over 1.2GB/s as throughtput. i posted a link somewhere on this site. I would think it will cost more then the MacPro does!


here is the link:

http://eshop.macsales.com/NewsRoom/Framework.cfm?page=PR/ssdent_100710.html=

Cindori said:
A Mac Pro is not "the fastest one on earth" because you can load data from the disk relatively fast.

"Fast" can also refer to computational power or graphical computational power.



2x SSD's is not the fastest setup either, I believe PCI-E SSD's are way faster (and expensive)

Transporteur said:
Not necessarily. OCZ has these drives available for about two years now and they're getting cheaper and cheaper. A 160GB RevoDrive X2 is about 550€ and is good for 740MB/s reads and 690MB/s writes.
The only disadvantage of these drives is, they don't boot OS X. OCZ claimed to be working on that issue, though.
Hopefully we will see some bootable PCIe SSD's soon. SATA 6.0Gb/s doesn't really cut it, software raiding SSD's in the Pro has too much limitations (throughput limit = limited amount of total drives), as does hardware raiding (no sleep support).
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

this is the PCIe SSD you are after.

1.4GB/s each way.
 
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