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My Mac Debate...

mmzplanet

mmzplanet

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 4, 2004
221
0
Florida
I think I am stuck in a situation between an iMac and a Mac Pro.

My iTunes library is becoming very large. Its getting to the 150GB neighborhood. I can easily multiply that 20 times if I wanted to rather quickly. (The DV collection and TV Show on DVD collection we have is huge) On top of that I have 20-25GB of music and a 30GB iPhoto library.

So basically I need drive space. My Mac is an Aluminum iMac. I have the iTunes library sitting on an external 1TB RAID1 (500GB usable space) connected via FW800. Time Machine is using an external 320GB via FW400. Having those 2 drives connected just seems to slow my Mac down. Its a very noticeable improvement if I disconnect them.

I rarely need the power of a Mac Pro. On occasion it would be nice to have. but almost 3k is a difficult amount to spend when I rarely need that kind of power. I could see it being used when I use iMovie or Handbrake, and I do use boot camp to use FS2004/FSX. I also do some light photo editing with Photoshop on occasion.

The Mac Pro would give me 4 internal drive bays for storing all that media. That seems to be the biggest feature that draws me to it for now. Using the external drives just really suck.

So the advice I am looking for is what can I do to make either the iMac perform better with the external drives I have (I may add more later), or what setup should I migrate to. Am I gonna regret spending that much on a Mac Pro? Maybe I can get an older G4 Power mac and use it as a "media server".

What do you think?
 
Oh yeah.... plus my Mac streams media to a XBox 360 for now. Apple TV is coming later I hope.
 
Alternative to Drobo (which is just a large external disk array) would be something like Synology's 207e disk station, which is a RAID 5 capable 4-disk NAS that includes daap (iTunes), ftp and basic web servers. It's Mac-friendly, too.

By the way, an external HD or NAS should not be slowing your machine down in any way (all my machines here run with either external drives or network drives mounted all the time - no performance hit whatsoever).
 
tersono said:
By the way, an external HD or NAS should not be slowing your machine down in any way (all my machines here run with either external drives or network drives mounted all the time - no performance hit whatsoever).
Click to expand...

Its not as noticeable once you get going, but logging in takes way too long. Sometimes launching apps may take extra time... but once an app is running its great.
 
mmzplanet said:
Its not as noticeable once you get going, but logging in takes way too long. Sometimes launching apps may take extra time... but once an app is running its great.
Click to expand...

hmmm, how often are you logging in then? it seems a bit extreme to buy a mac pro just to speed up the log in and app launch times
 
Macky-Mac said:
hmmm, how often are you logging in then? it seems a bit extreme to buy a mac pro just to speed up the log in and app launch times
Click to expand...

Its not often, but its just hard to explain this kind of thing. Overall it has much more "snap" when the drives are not connected. If that makes any sense at all.

The Mac Pro could serve more than to fix this issue... anticipate adding much more drive space for iTunes. Just adding 6 seasons of Scrubs and 12 movies has eaten plenty of space already. I still have 10 seasons of Friends to go. Then I would likely move on to ER, Oz, and more. The internal drive bays would be a big help.

I can talk myself into a Mac Pro all day long :) Who wouldn't. :D
 
mmzplanet said:
Its not often, but its just hard to explain this kind of thing. Overall it has much more "snap" when the drives are not connected. If that makes any sense at all.

The Mac Pro could serve more than to fix this issue... anticipate adding much more drive space for iTunes. Just adding 6 seasons of Scrubs and 12 movies has eaten plenty of space already. I still have 10 seasons of Friends to go. Then I would likely move on to ER, Oz, and more. The internal drive bays would be a big help.

I can talk myself into a Mac Pro all day long :) Who wouldn't. :D
Click to expand...

The space would be my reason to get a MacPro as well one of these days. I have 70GB left on my iMac. I have a 250GB Passport that I am about to start using with it. Love my TV shows.
 
One of the major reasons I purchased a Mac Pro is precisely because I like to have options when it comes to hard drive storage. I already have more external USB devices than I know what to do with (but can't get rid of any of them, as I do use each one at least 1-2 times a month or more), so the idea of having external hard drives cluttering up my computer area is a huge turn-off for me - I refuse to buy one.

Other reasons I bought my Pro: I'm used to a separate desktop/monitor setup from 15+ years on PCs, and wasn't willing to switch to an all-in-one solution like an iMac (even though they're more than capable of doing what I need) -- Having the ability to install more than 4 gigs of memory (I tend to keep a LOT of programs open at once, including Photoshop and Lightroom.)

My only option from Apple was the Mac Pro - even though I had a discount through my NAPP membership, the default setup still ran me around $2550 (plus an extra 8 gigs RAM from OWC.) Do I regret spending so much money? Nope. I had the extra saved up, and it was worth that much to me to finally get away from Windows for good, and have an awesome machine in the process. Besides, the resale value on Macs is crazy, so I figure I should be able to make back most of the original cost of the machine in a few years if/when I decide to upgrade.

If you have the cash, it's *worth* the power you get...even if you decide on just a quad core machine (which I think runs about $2200.)

-Bryan
 
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