Mac Pro Advise

[Grimace]

Anyone who buys a MacPro with less than 4GB of RAM should buy an iMac. Plain and simple if you do not need 4GB of RAM or cannot think of what to do with it. Buy an iMac.

I have 3GB and I definitely need my Mac Pro. I can't run a 30" display off of an iMac nor have 4x320GB hard drives. I often need to simultaneously burn two discs at once. I'm not trying to be too argumentative, but I think your statement was a little bit too broad.

 

[ckmaui]

CS2 can use more than 2 gigs it uses 3 or 3.5 depending on what you read
also any more memory will be used as scratch and greatly help out with speed for some PS tasks

so maxing out memory is a OK thing to do really


as far as the HDs I have 2 750 in raid 0 for data then 2 maxtor in raid 0 for personal stuff and 2 more in a raid 1 config for my boot and use FW to back up to
our other main workstation uses a raid 1/0 setup

a lot of my work was with large PS files not as large as yours dunes but still in the couple hundred meg size mostly interiors

a dedicated scratch disc will help you out with that large of files

when our other workstation had a 8 disc raid 0 on it I did some PS testing and after about 300 meg files a dedicated scratch helped below that the scratch on the same disc as files was just as fast !

now one other thing you can do is use the two extra SATA ports that come on the mac pro MB so you can use 6 drives easy enough

one option is to snake some cables out the back and use a firmtek external SATA case this way you can swap out drives if you want to


now one other trick you can do is if you have a backup HD partition it so you use the outer part for scratch disc
say you use a 750 gig HD partition say 25 gigs for scratch then use the rest as BU

if you only use the drive as bu it wont be written to while you are doing PS work so it will act just like a dedicated scratch (which it is) and you also use the extra part of it best of both worlds

also make sure you use a program like super duper to make a bu of your boot drive in case it goes down one day !

also for that large of files a nice 4 disc raid 0 would be quick and help write those files a lot quicker

one setup for your large files might be
1) boot drive 500 gig maxtor (so you have some room for personal files music and such)
2) 140 gig raptor scratch
3) maxtor 500 gig in raid 0
4) maxtor 500 gig in raid 0
5) maxtor 500 gig in raid 0
6) maxtor 500 gig in raid 0

5) and 6) are the extra two slots

then get a external FW for making a bootable bu
and get a OWC mercury elite FW800 dual drive setup and put 2 750 gig HDs in it for your backup of the 2 gig raid 0 you will have

you never want to fill a disc up that much so 1.5 gigs will back up 2 gigs nicely

 

[dpaanlka]

I just am interested for future reference. I often times have iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, iDVD, Firefox, iChat, and Fire running and it runs smooth, though I know a little bit slower. When closing iPhoto and GarageBand and I am in great shape. I run this on 1 gig of ram on an iMac g5.

You need not consider a Mac Pro.