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nMP or iMac for 4K
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[Oliver Peters] “One of the concerns I have in this upgrade is that a lot of the desirable local storage is shifting to Thunderbolt. So If I want to add a fast local RAID, it almost pushes me into a new Mac Pro as opposed to updating the tower any further. “
However I think you can update the tower to a max of 32TB using 8TB 3.5″ drives. I am using two of these HGST 8TB drives: https://amzn.com/B00NP6AOCK. They are very energy efficient and don’t output much heat for this class of HDD, yet performance is high. It also has a five-year warranty.
The competing drive in this category is the Seagate 8TB Enterprise: https://amzn.com/B016AG0ITU
If you later get a refreshed nMP you could redeploy these drives in a RAID box like those from OWC. I also use a 16TB Thunderbay 4, and it (along with SoftRAID) work very well: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2IVT16.0S/. In theory I could put 4 x 8TB drives in it for 32TB total.
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[Joe Marler] “However I think you can update the tower to a max of 32TB using 8TB 3.5” drives. “
Any concerns with the draw on the internal power supply of the tower? I presume you would need to put the boot drive into one of the optical slots if you populated the tower with 4 of these drives?
Also, have you run any AJA Sys Tests or BMD Tests on these for throughput speed?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Two features and a slew of shorts and music videos, not once did I use my ROCKET thanks to the nMP.
Took a chance years ago and paid too much for this card.
Its great for DIT and dailies thats all.
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[Oliver Peters] “Any concerns with the draw on the internal power supply of the tower? I presume you would need to put the boot drive into one of the optical slots if you populated the tower with 4 of these drives?
Also, have you run any AJA Sys Tests or BMD Tests on these for throughput speed?”
The spec sheet for the HGST 8TB drive says 7.4 watts operating power consumption. That is much less than a 2TB or 4TB WD Caviar Black, and only slightly more than a 4TB WD Red. You’d have to compare this to the spec of your current drives.
Re capacity limits, that would be determined by the version of OS X and possibly even the firmware. I think from an OS standpoint 32TB is doable, however there might be issues with the firmware and disk controller. You’d have to investigate that. Some info is here: https://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/faq/mac-pro-how-to-upgrade-hard-drives-what-type-supported.html
The new HDDs are 6 gbps SATA 3 so I don’t know the backward compatibility with the stock Mac Pro 5,1 disk controller.
I’m using two HGST 8TB drives in an two-drive OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual as RAID-0: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/Elite-Dual-RAID
That is Thunderbolt so of course it wouldn’t work with an older Mac Pro but from a pure HDD standpoint the drives are pretty good. In the above chassis I get 306 MB/sec read and 382 MB/sec write on Black Magic, and 390.8 MB/sec read and 329.9 MB/sec write on Quick Bench’s extended test, with “allow cache effects” disabled. I get substantially faster performance with 4x 4TB HGST drives in a Thunderbay 4 using SoftRAID for RAID-5, about 487 MB/sec write and 532 MB/sec read on Black Magic.
I’m not experienced with the specifics up upgrading older Mac Pros with newer HDDs, I just wanted to mention it as a possibility. It might not be worth the investigative time and effort. That would lead to either a nMP or a top-spec iMac 27, which both support Thunderbolt. For professional use I would tilt toward the nMP. I know lots of people (myself included) do professional 4k editing on a top-spec iMac 27 but I think the extreme pixel count of the retina screen slows things down a bit, even if using proxy. The iMac is very fast at importing and exporting H264 on FCPX due to Quick Sync, but that is only one part of a large workflow. If you have to transcode to proxy, or are using ProRes or REDCODE then much of that Quick Sync advantage goes out the window.
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I have a 4 drive RAID 0 inside my old Mac Pro using WD Black drives with SSD’s in optical bay. I get approx 500MB read/write via AJA System test and I use Softraid. SSD performance limited to 300MB per sec due to older SATA in the MOBO.
Big issue is GPU – seems if you’re more Premiere than nVidia is the way to go while AMD is best for FCPX.
It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 -
If you are going to use 4k RAW, you are going to want to have the Dual GPUs. I would not be afraid of the D700s.
We have D700s and haven’t had one single issue with our MacPros. If you use Resolve at all, you’ll want the dual GPUs as well.
The MacPro will last you longer than the iMac, but the price is higher.
I miss my MacPros when I am not around them. They make everything go faster than Apple’s more mobile based computers.
We just moved and rewired everything and we literally got rid of an entire rack of patching and cables due to Thunderbolt. It is truly an awesome technology.
I’m sure Apple will release a new computer, but for now the Tube is what they are offering. If I had to buy new today (we ordered ours when the day they were released) I would buy again.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “If you are going to use 4k RAW, you are going to want to have the Dual GPUs. I would not be afraid of the D700s.
We have D700s and haven’t had one single issue with our MacPros. If you use Resolve at all, you’ll want the dual GPUs as well.”What’s your opinion of going to the nMP over upgrading the current 12-core tower(s) with a faster GPU (GTX 980) and more RAM?
[Jeremy Garchow] “We just moved and rewired everything and we literally got rid of an entire rack of patching and cables due to Thunderbolt.”
That’s definitely a plus and a real move into the future. The choices for non-Thunderbolt RAIDs are actually getting a bit slim compared to a couple of years ago.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “What’s your opinion of going to the nMP over upgrading the current 12-core tower(s) with a faster GPU (GTX 980) and more RAM?”
I’ve never done a speed comparison, but my guess is that the new MacPro is going to win in day to day use. We still have a cheesegrater and editing on it is an exercise in futility. I’d rather edit on a MacBook Air than a cheesegrater in fcpx.
You can keep spending in the 12 core, but the architecture of the new MacPro will make fcpx work more quickly.
I use Blackmagic video out only for Resolve. I’d recommend an AJA TTap (or similar) for fcpx video out on the thunderbolt Mac. It makes a huge difference in performance in fcpx, measurably huge.
I’d think about a storage medium that isn’t tied to Thunderbolt 2, but a different standard such as 10GigE or 8/16Gb fibre. That way, when TB3 comes along you will still have access to the storage by a converter box of some sort (PCIe/TB3 native/etc), and you can still keep other TB2 computers tied to it as well.
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Thanks.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I’ve never done a speed comparison, but my guess is that the new MacPro is going to win in day to day use. We still have a cheesegrater and editing on it is an exercise in futility. I’d rather edit on a MacBook Air than a cheesegrater in fcpx.
You can keep spending in the 12 core, but the architecture of the new MacPro will make fcpx work more quickly.”
Really? I don’t know much about the new Macs I guess. I edited on a 2012 Macbook Pro i7 quadcore about a month
ago for news coverage for a TV station and it didn’t seem as fast as my 2009 Mac Pro with upgraded CPU, SSD’s,
980Ti GPU and so on. For what it’s worth, I get 25 seconds on the Bruce X test, but I have no idea if that is any
good compared to the new Macs or not. It sure seems to edit fast in FCP X to me, but I will admit I’m not
sure what ‘good’ is.Gabe Strong
G-Force Productions
http://www.gforcevideo.com
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