Bernard Newnham
Forum Replies Created
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“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.”
Not huge amount of choice about that – you don’t get much media on 120Gb.
Bernie
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There’s a how-to here –
https://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-to-speed-up-your-mac-with-a-ssd-drive.htmlI don’t know Carbon Copy Cloner, but I know that Clonezilla does a good job.
B
Bernie
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“128GB SSD would be too small for a system drive.”
I’ve now replaced my first SSD – see above – with a Sandisk 120Gb Extreme. hopefully it will last a lot longer than the other one, which is being returned under warranty.
The trick is to only put the system on the system drive, not every application. You can easily include an editing application in that – PPro is 780Mb, After Effects 860Mb, Photoshop 516MB (all CS6). Everything else is on various internal and external discs.
Having just today cloned the old SSD to a spinning drive and thence to a new SSD, including restating the machine a number of times, the difference when using the SSD is considerable.
Bernie
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An SSD works quite amazingly well as a boot drive – the best thing you can currently do to speed up a computer. I used to walk away and put the kettle on, now it takes just a few seconds for W7 to start.
The slight downside for me is that I bought an OCZ Petrol, which after six months needs replacing. It doesn’t like starting and every so often needs chkdisk to sort it’s failing state. I understand that the problems with these may have been sorted now, but I’ve ordered up a new model Sandisk as a replacement.
Problems or not, I’m not planning to go back to spinning metal for my boot drive.
Bernie
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Because windows is taken as read, that’s all. If they used some non-standard OS – Ubuntu Friendly Frog, or something – they would make a deal of it, but Windows is what you would expect unless you only live in a Mac world.
And – for those who are making their first steps out of the closed society that is Apple – if you go to a company and they don’t sell the exact flavour of PC that you want, go elsewhere. There are millions of PC sellers all looking to please you, who will happily build to your spec, probably in just a few hours.
And if that still doesn’t work, just build the one you want. That nice new Asus Z77 board might be a good place to start.
Bernie
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“And I didn’t need any cheap Chinese labor from Foxconn, I put it together all by myself!”
Every chip neatly soldered in by you…?
Bernie
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I have an SSD for the system drive in this machine. You notice the difference especially in startup time, but everything that uses the operating system goes significant;y faster. SSDs seem to get cheaper daily.
Be aware, though, that not every system can run OSX well – though I think that most can. Much knowledge on this can be found at https://tonymacx86.com/ , and there’s a good forum. With this new Asus board coming out, I expect a thread on its use will be there very soon.
Bernie
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“Not sure what ASUS means, but I agree that they are not simply going to cobble together new tech like thunderbolt into an existing tower design. If that were the case, they’d have released it last year.”
OK – Asus is one of the world’s major motherboard manufacturers, amongst other things. Foxconn is another, and they are the ones who build motherboards that are put in an expensive shiny box labelled Apple.
What Lance was demonstrating in his first post was that Asus are selling the P8Z77-V Premium, which is a motherboard that has a Thunderbolt socket. Despite all the chat here from Mac Pro users, this really isn’t a big deal in the outside world. If you look at the board, it has lots of connectors, and connections change and evolve all the time. You won’t see a parallel printer port any more, nor a serial port, because their day has gone. You rarely see Firewire ports any more – not that they were that common anyway. Things change quickly outside the world of Apple.
Asus won’t “cobble together new tech like thunderbolt into an existing tower” because they don’t make towers – but using that motherboard you could build – tomorrow, not 2013 – a machine with any Ivy Bridge processor, huge amounts of memory and a GTX6xx video card. Drives, SSDs etc to your endless choice.
If a manufacturer was to build a game changer, it would have to run the x86 instruction set and more, and also run significantly faster for the same price. It seems that the day might come when that could be possible using a RISC based processor like ARM. But not this week.
Bernie
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“Consider that Blackmagic only certifies their Shuttle on one MSI laptop.”
I rather think all that certification stuff is just a gesture really. There are loads of laptops and hundreds of combinations of motherboard, processor and memory, so it would be impossible to test on anything more than a very few. And as things in the pc world change and improve almost weekly, they’d have to do it all over again pretty soon.
My Blackmagic Intensity Pro works perfectly on both my pc and Hackintosh, and I can’t at the moment remember what’s in either. Manufacturers have to work in an environment where there’s a basic standard that everyone works to – but the actual components come from all over the place. The fixed design of Apple gear stifles development in the same way that the game consoles do.
And Asus is quality stuff, the Rolls Royce of motherboards. And a lot cheaper that Apple.
Bernie
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“However, for mograph and 3D animation (my main business), Xeons are great. With multiple processors in the same machine — and multithreaded renderers able to use them — there’s a huge performance gain over the Core series.”
Entirely understood, but I rather think that your niche area isn’t typical of the majority here. I just get the feeling that the joke about the man who goes to heaven might be appropriate –
“Welcome to heaven”
“I’m very pleased to be here – but what’s that big wall over there?”
” Ahh – that wall separates everyone else from the Catholics – they think they’re the only ones here”The world of everyone else is much bigger than the world of the Mac Pro, and it moves much faster. I think at this point it would be a mistake to sit inside the big wall and not look out .
Bernie