To Raid or not to Raid? (and some other questions)

[benhg]

Hello,

I am considering purchasing a mac pro but i am wondering if it is worth getting the RAID card. Basically i plan to upgrade to a solid state hard drive sometime in the future (when they are a bit bigger) so with that in mind will the RAID card become a problem or will it still serve a purpose?

On some side notes:

If i only plan to have 2 monitors is the NVIDIA 8800 my best choice?

and finally, does the AppleCare Protection Plan increase the hardware warrenty to 3 years also?

Thank you

 

[bigbossbmb]

1) What do you need the extra I/O for?

2) Are you going to be running GPU dependent apps? If no, then the 8800 is a waste for you.

3) Yes, Applecare extends your warranty to 3 years.

 

[benhg]

The reason i was thinking of the RAID card is because i was told that it allows me to use the 15,000rpm drives. But if the RAID card is useless for SSD ill just get a normal drive and wait for the SSD's.

I guess what i want to know is say in a years time i purchase 2 solid state hard drives for my mac pro, will the raid card improve the performance of the drives or will it be redundant?

 

[Toups]

SSD are not faster for throughput, which is what I am going to assume you are looking for, but are faster for random read write and seek times.

With that said, they do not pose any significant gains over current SATAII 7200 RPM drives, especially those with 32mb cache. Your best bet if you go with RAID is to get the SATAII drives or some of the 15k RPM SAS (much more expensive)

More than likely though raw read/write is not going to be your bottle-neck, as there are few if any programs that could process 250+MBps data stream even with an 8-core 3.2 system with 32GB of RAM. Keep in mind, even with HD video editing, you would have bandwidth for 4 or more simultaneous streams