Cleanable Dust filters for intake fans, and the PSU mounted at the bottom (coolest part of the case)
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What would you like to see in a Mac Pro case update?
- Thread starter maclover001
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It has four drive bays. FOUR. Which is 2 more than I will ever use for internal storage. Why the hell would anyone want more than four? You know it's a workstation, right, and not a server room? How often do you run across workstations with more than 4 drive bays anyway? PC's come with 8 drive bays standard now, or what?
Actually every PC I built had at least 6 bays.
If you never use more than 2 bays, I would suggest you're probably more of an imac user than a mac pro.
Here is what i have now:
Bay1 - raptor boot
Bay2 - 500GB scratch disk
Bay3 - 1TB video render and itunes disk
Bay4 - 1TB Aperture and Lightroom images catalog
Here is what I would do with 8 bays:
Bay 1/2: RAID1 OS and apps
Bay 3/4 - RAID0 scratch disk array
Bay 5 - 1TB video render
Bay 6 - 1TB aperture and lightroom images
Bay 7/8 - Raid1 Time machine volume
I could actually do with another several bays to setup my lightroom volume as RAID5...
In short, there are LOTS of uses for multiple drives bays. Yes I can do that externally with RAID arrays (which I'm doing now) but that just creates clutter and more noise and cords. I would not be that hard to add another row of 4 drive bays and as a workstation level machine I think it should have it.
And again, I find it laughable that you think 2 bays is all that is needed.
Not that this is ever likely to happen, but since they kind of split the Nehalem mac pros with the quad core and 8 core ones being slightly different, one wonders if that would settle the argument with a smaller machine for fewer bays and a larger machine with 8 plus bays (and also has more cores, etc.). That or the never-going-to-happen midrange tower.
If they rework the case they should include SATA 3 which was just launched and USB 3.0.
Hot swap is a big Yes. More than 4 bays seems a bit useless if they give the option to use the second optical bay for 2 HDs. There should be several eSATA connectors though. Definitively Blu-Ray support!!
Putting the power unit back in the bottom would be foolish because it will only heat up the CPUs above it.
A better way to remove the fan unit and the CPU cover would be nice for better access to the PCIe connectors and ODD-SATA ports, unless they did that allready (I have a 2006).
Hot swap is a big Yes. More than 4 bays seems a bit useless if they give the option to use the second optical bay for 2 HDs. There should be several eSATA connectors though. Definitively Blu-Ray support!!
Putting the power unit back in the bottom would be foolish because it will only heat up the CPUs above it.
A better way to remove the fan unit and the CPU cover would be nice for better access to the PCIe connectors and ODD-SATA ports, unless they did that allready (I have a 2006).
No, the iMac is useless as a DAW. I need a server-grade machine since it's the only thing that can handle the massive amount of processing power I need in order to keep hundreds of VST/AU instruments and audio tracks going at once. If I try to play that back on an iMac it will crackle horribly before choking about two bars into the song. Massive amounts of internal storage, on the other hand, will do absolutely zilch for my needs. All I need is one drive for OS/software/soundbanks and one scratch disk for audio tracks, or 2 of each, ideally RAID 1 for the OS/software/sound library pair and RAID 0 for speeding up the audio track pair. Everything else (iTunes and movie library, project backups etc) is on a 2 TB RAID 1 NAS drive accessible from all my machines. You see, not all Mac Pro users are video rendering maniacs.
Yeah, that sounds like an excellent idea. Leave the quadcore lean, and bog down the octacore with a full tower case, a dozen drive bays, bigger power supply, more card slots etc. That way both the regular users and the must-have-more-of-everything users should be happy.
Right, so Apple will reduce the airflow, just to make it look "better". Who cares if the processors get frazzled or the hard drives overheat and crash? I'm sure Apple stock holders will be more than happy to see their dividends used on warranty claims caused by stupid design decisions.
If that's what you can see Apple doing, then perhaps you need your eyes testing.
I'm not talking about the PMG5 thing, I mean like this:
(That box is my own custom rig, if you were wondering)
It doesn't add to the height. Instead of having the board against the floor of the case, and a gap up top, the board is against the roof and the gap is on the bottom. It can get air from a lower-front intake fan, which the MP already has. There is no reason you couldn't use a single 120mm top fan (or the typical 80mm rear fan) on this design of PSU, as it is a normal ATX/EPS unit, just mounted upside down. I'm not advocating some low-profile nonstandard thing that uses a blower to suck air up from below. That would be awful compared to the current setup.
Yeah, because we all know that function is so much more important to Apple than form. That's why they put a screen on the MacBook Pro so glossy that your bathroom mirror looks like sandpaper by comparison. That's why they stuck a vertically mounted optical drive in the iMac, despite telling everyone when making a case for the lampshade iMac G4 that nobody in their right mind would put a vertical optical drive on a computer since it would run slow as hell. That's why the iPhone has no battery door, so that you will have to sit near an outlet with the charger plugged in at all times if you actually plan on using the iPhone for everything it's capable of. That's why they made TiBook and MBA hinges so fragile that they snap like twigs.
All that Jobs wants from Ive is a reason to say "OMG it's so THIN! Look how THIN it is!" or "isn't that gooooorgeous? Eh? Eh?". If the best sales pitch he can squeeze out of a product is "it has great airflow", it'll be sent back to the drawing board.
I want a redesigned case, like the Power Mac G4 with the guts mounted on the door. It makes for much better access. But if not that, a bit of acrylic on the access panel. Even better, make the "
" symbols clear kinda like the Quicksilver, but all the way through.
" symbols clear kinda like the Quicksilver, but all the way through.You'll notice that not a single one of your examples actually costs Apple any money in repairs due to their choice to make have form over function.
And neither would making the cheese-grater holes smaller. In case you haven't noticed, plenty of other manufacturers get by with cases that are nearly closed, without the components burning up. And those usually don't have the benefit of an all-aluminium enclosure that acts like a ginormous heat sink. The notion that a Mac Pro would turn into a furnace just because you would replace the chicken wire on the front and back with something that has smaller holes is ridiculous. Airflow is good, but you don't need a frickin' wind tunnel. I have a Dell XPS700, a model that was built around airflow (the case even borrowed design cues from jet engines), with a degree of obsession that gave it too much airflow... temperatures reported by GPU and CPU are ridiculously low, just barely above room temperature, and at what cost? Ludicrous amounts of raw, undampened fan and HD noise, massive dust buildup. I had to switch to a fanless video card just to be able to stand being in the same room as this behemoth for more than 10 minutes.
Note - I personally don't want smaller holes, that's maclover001's thing, I'm just arguing against the notion that it would lead to mass frazzling of processors, fried hard drives and pandemonium among stock holders.
But it might cost more to manufacture in terms of aluminum used (drop in the bucket, I know) and make your case marginally heavier. Not that it matters. I just thought I'd say it.
Yeah, that's possible.
These guys (Voodoo) seem to have designed an aluminum case with no openings on the front except disc slots...
Apparently it's a combo of H20 cooling, integrated copper cooling pipes and vertical airflow.
I'd like it if there was the option of a horizontal desktop chassis; an aesthetic mix between the Pro and Xserve.
A rear eSATA port wouldn't be too much to ask for either, would it?
A rear eSATA port wouldn't be too much to ask for either, would it?
Now there's a case design I doubt we'll see coming back - the horizontal "pizza box" tower. I will admit, it would feel weird putting my LCD on top of one, never mind that we always used to put the CRTs on top of them.
I think it's too closely associated with Apple's dark years in the mid 90's... when they had a whole arsenal of beige pizza boxes that ranged from low end Performa to high-end PPCs with confusing model numbers. The horizontal design is jinxed as far as Apple is concerned. Mac Mini and the blob at the base of the lampshade iMac is the closest they'll ever get to horizontal layout...
A glowing Apple Logo on the front.
Only if it were able to turned off. I'm so sick of all the extraneous show-off lighting these days, especially when they use blue LEDs
I'm not talking about the PMG5 thing, I mean like this:
(That box is my own custom rig, if you were wondering)
It doesn't add to the height. Instead of having the board against the floor of the case, and a gap up top, the board is against the roof and the gap is on the bottom. It can get air from a lower-front intake fan, which the MP already has. There is no reason you couldn't use a single 120mm top fan (or the typical 80mm rear fan) on this design of PSU, as it is a normal ATX/EPS unit, just mounted upside down. I'm not advocating some low-profile nonstandard thing that uses a blower to suck air up from below. That would be awful compared to the current setup.
Oh. like that. Yeah, that would be OK I guess. The only nit-picky downsides I can see to that is it might be a tad noisier and since it works as an additional exhaust and heat rises it might be a tad less efficient at removing heat from the case.
I was thinking about something like this:
This is one of my DELL Precision 650 workstations. A few of my DELL PowerEdges have like this too. It's bad and you can trust me you don't want it. It's OK when new or if you keep it on a desktop but otherwise no thank you!
Also with a PSU in the bottom most systems seem to telescope more noise into whatever surface it's sitting on. If that's a thin-skinned desk then the desk will act a bit like a loud-speaker and amplify the noise.
Yeah, that's possible.
These guys (Voodoo) seem to have designed an aluminum case with no openings on the front except disc slots...
Apparently it's a combo of H20 cooling, integrated copper cooling pipes and vertical airflow.
That's impressive! Super clean and elegant. I like it.
Oh no not blue. That color is soo annoying on LED's. I think just a soft white glowing Apple Logo would be quite smart looking.