Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iMac Pro Base Model Teardown Reveals 2x SSD RAID Configuration and Four 8GB DIMM Modules

itguy06 said:
Not really a lot of If's. You'll know if your computer is thermally throttling - fans will be going crazy and clock speed and performance will go down. The idea of keeping cool as possible is more for overclocking as you generate more heat so you need to get rid of more heat. It does little for longevity as long as it's within the design parameters. I'm hoping Apple put the iMac in an environmental chamber, cranked it up to the max they support and ran it at 100% load for days on end to make sure their cooling solution works.

I do enterprise IT and have for 20 years. I've had experience with datacenter cooling failures where the remaining capacity was not enough to keep the DC under 90F for many hours due to parts availability. The servers throttled back, fans were crazy, and all lived their expected 3-5 year life. Not optimal by any stretch of the imagination but no harm done. These things are far tougher than most people think.
Click to expand...

Good to hear. Luckily I've never had a Mac where the fans spun up more easily than I thought they should. Too obsessive I guess. I'll just focus on the beautiful Apple product pictures and try to forget the mess that OWC found under those heat sinks :eek:
 
dogslobber said:
Maybe, but you should always take appropriate ESD precautions as static electricity will kill your components sooner or later.
Click to expand...

Most certainly, though honestly I’m far more concerned about blowing myself up at a gas pump via static discharge than I am zapping a PC component. My cMP is old, and I’ve done a lot to it. It’s not that the risk isn’t there, but I know not to put on fleece socks and shuffle around the carpet while rubbing a balloon on my head just before I open up something electronic. :p
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Mainyehc
dmylrea said:
RAID 0 with two drives doubles your chances of a complete volume failure. I would never want all my data (or even worse, a "Pro's" data) sitting on a RAID 0 volume. It seems it wouldn't take more than a little "glitch" to render your drives useless.
Click to expand...
RAID 0 of two NVME modules isn't really that much different than an single NVME channel. The flash controllers are already striping data across memory chips on a single NVME module. There really isn't much difference between two NVME PCIex4 modules in RAID0 and a single NVME Module with a PCIex8 interface.
 
  • Like
Reactions: craig1410
velocityg4 said:
That's the price now. As the Xeon is typically found in servers. Once corporations start dumping their servers. Those formerly top end Xeon sell for a pittance. In for or five years when the iMac Pro is starting to show it's age. You could bump it up to the 18 core for $100 to $200. Getting a few more years out of it.
Click to expand...

If a $200 CPU is good enough for your needs, you aren't even remotely in the market for an iMac Pro. And I really fail to see how your needs would change so drastically within four to five years.
 
  • Like
Reactions: timd.mackey
dmylrea said:
RAID 0 with two drives doubles your chances of a complete volume failure. I would never want all my data (or even worse, a "Pro's" data) sitting on a RAID 0 volume. It seems it wouldn't take more than a little "glitch" to render your drives useless.
Click to expand...

Doesn’t actually double your chances, for most failure modes, but point taken.
 
velocityg4 said:
That's the price now. As the Xeon is typically found in servers. Once corporations start dumping their servers. Those formerly top end Xeon sell for a pittance. In for or five years when the iMac Pro is starting to show it's age. You could bump it up to the 18 core for $100 to $200. Getting a few more years out of it.
Click to expand...
Servers typically use the Xeon E5, these use the new Xeon W (for workstation). Not the same thing, and I'd be suprised if an E5 is drop in compatible with a W.
 
Most professional studios I've been inside are running all of their media off of servers and not storing it locally. However, local SSD storage is incredibly beneficial for caching while working on a project.
 
  • Like
Reactions: timd.mackey
haddy said:
Okay this is from wikipedia .....

"Correlated failures[edit]
In practice, the drives are often the same age (with similar wear) and subject to the same environment. Since many drive failures are due to mechanical issues (which are more likely on older drives), this violates the assumptions of independent, identical rate of failure amongst drives; failures are in fact statistically correlated.[11] In practice, the chances for a second failure before the first has been recovered (causing data loss) are higher than the chances for random failures. In a study of about 100,000 drives, the probability of two drives in the same cluster failing within one hour was four times larger than predicted by the exponential statistical distribution—which characterizes processes in which events occur continuously and independently at a constant average rate. The probability of two failures in the same 10-hour period was twice as large as predicted by an exponential distribution.[72]"
Click to expand...

Of course the story may be different for solid state drives.
 
I guess, upgrading all memory at once favors batter performance ? This would sound true, if Apple wants to to swap all four out instead of single memory.

The speaker assemblies look huge..,.. Couldn't Apple have used smaller ones to give u more space?
 
Tech198 said:
I guess, upgrading all memory at once favors batter performance ? This would sound true, if Apple wants to to swap all four out instead of single memory.

The speaker assemblies look huge..,.. Couldn't Apple have used smaller ones to give u more space?
Click to expand...
Bigger speakers gives better sound
 
cmaier said:
Bigger speakers gives better sound
Click to expand...

Regardless of how big the speakers are inside the iMac Pro... anyone who is serious about sound on their workstation will use external speakers. :p

It's like the comment above talking about external Thunderbolt or NAS drives. The internal storage is fine for boot and apps. But a person using a $5,000 workstation will probably have needs that are better served by external storage. (size, speed, redundancy, or all 3)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Mainyehc
Michael Scrip said:
Regardless of how big the speakers are inside the iMac Pro... anyone who is serious about sound on their workstation will use external speakers. :p

It's like the comment above talking about external Thunderbolt or NAS drives. The internal storage is fine for boot and apps. But a person using a $5,000 workstation will probably have needs that are better served by external storage. (size, speed, redundancy, or all 3)
Click to expand...

You can say the same thing abou graphic cards and cpus.
 
chucker23n1 said:
The part I don't get is: what's the source for the RAID being RAID 0? As far as I can tell, all we know for a fact is that these are two SSDs — we don't know at all if striping is used.
Click to expand...

Apple PR have said that data is written and read in parallel to both SSDs. In terms of functionality, this is disk striping which is what RAID 0 is.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back