Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Don Walker] “Would all that be true if a 2008 MacPro had a SSD as a boot drive?”
Yep! And if you aren’t using your 2nd optical bay, you can put the SSD boot drive in there with this kit and have all four main bays for media HDDs.
Also, since the Mac Pro’s SATA bus is the older SATA 3G, you can get your SSD for less $/GB than the newer SATA 6G models. Look at the Intel 320 or the OWC Electra 3G. I’ve had good luck with an OCZ Agility 2 in my wife’s old MacBook as well, but I’ve also read horror stories about OCZs failing prematurely.
Best,
Andy -
Unfortunately, if you have to work with what you’ve got, you’re going to remain stuck with a series of workarounds. StorageDNA has an integrated solution for what you want to do called Evolution, but it would represent a significant investment.
Best,
Andy -
[Lemur Hayop] “Does SSD do more than boot faster?”
It removes all the lag from your interactions. Apps launch much faster, in many cases instantly. Documents open instantly. QuickView previews appear much more quickly. Finder browsing is lag-free. Spotlight searches return results immediately. Most of the beachballs you get are the OS waiting for storage to catch up to operations. You’ll see much fewer beachballs when you boot from an SSD.
[Lemur Hayop] “Will it speed up video rendering?”
It doesn’t make computational stuff happen much faster (rendering, transcoding, etc), but all those little lags add up, and once you’ve spent time on an SSD-booted system and go back to an HDD-booted system you really notice the lag.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “I won’t argue that SSDs have all the forward momentum, but I think that today, most of us would benefit from a hybrid approach of SSDs for boot (or any high IOPS work) and HDDs for media.”
Completely agree, and I roll that way today. I was just soothsaying.
Best,
Andy -
[tony west] “He will cut mainly with X and put legend in with an adapter.”
He can always just share another Mac’s ODD.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “SSDs are getting cheaper, but they won’t supplant mechanical drives for media storage until they’re more cost effective per unit storage.”
We’re quickly approaching that crossover point:
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “Which leads us right back to the question about whether Apple cares about pros. The features that Apple have chosen to exclude (or chosen not to include, if you prefer) may not be important in common use in the general case — but they are important and are frequently used among video professionals.”
I regret that I have but one “Like” to give to this post!
Best,
Andy -
[tony west] “He went to put his old fcp on the MBPr and he noticed that there is no cd on that computer.
I guess he can find an adapter for that.
There is also no ethernet input.”
A couple things he should have taken note of before spending thousands of dollars on it, perhaps?
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “Solid state storage on portables is a trend I fully support.”
It’s a trend for all storage. HDD performance peaked years ago. They are still the density kings today, but they are already a performance bottleneck, especially when they are operating alone.
Best,
Andy -
[Craig Seeman] “Personally outside of very short ROI, I think doing anything to “enhance” a MP at this stage, throwing good money after bad. I do think, overall, if one is buying a “stock” machine, for a large number of people, the MBPr is a better choice given the all around speed.”
Yes. I think Mr. Galbraith’s article is missing the forest for the trees. The real story isn’t how the new MBPr is faster than the Mac Pro in many respects, it is that the Mac Pro did not get an update of any consequence. Pouring money into a 2010-vintage tower today is only a good idea if you bought it in 2010, and only if the updates are offset buy incremental revenue. My suggestion about the Accelsior card was more about how MacWorld could have been more transparent in the biases of their tests with a demonstration than it was a recommendation that anyone buy an Accelsior card for an old Mac Pro.
Incidentally, storage I/O is a factor in encoding performance as well, since the system is doing a lot of reading and writing of large files to do it. This is much more of a factor in clustered encoding scenarios than with single-system encoding though.
Best,
Andy
