Now that the power mac has made the change and is all PC on the inside wrapped up in a Mac OS can I finally buy PC video cards at those great PC video card prices to do future upgrades down the road? I've hated for years buying a Radeon 9800 Pro mac card that costs $150 more than the PC version. This made me really hate being a mac user. I'm hoping it's a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, no. It's not the cards/hardware that are different, but rather driver support. It would be great if nVidia and ATI would start making OSX drivers available for their off-the-shelf cards. But as of right now, OSX video drivers are only available for certain cards and typically via Apple only or an approved manufacturer. Apple is also famous for requiring their video cards or those approved for their systems to have special flags in their BIOS or firmware. So even if you wanted to save $1200 by buying a Quadro FX4500 from a third-party vendor (like PNY or EVGA, PNY happens to make the FX4500 cards used in the PowerMac and new Mac Pro), you can't -- they won't work. Or at least this wasn't the case a couple years ago and I haven't heard about it changing for the better... :(

The only problem with the 4 drive raid-0 is the fact that this same raid-0 will also contain the OS, program files and any other garbage you put on there. It is never a good idea to share a media drive with the OS. I really wish Apple would have put in 5 bays. 1 for the OS and garbage and 4 for the raid-0.


This is all very unfortunate, although we have one redeeming aspect:

"With Mac OS X installed on the primary hard drive and three Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drives striped together as a data storage volume, your Mac Pro can deliver data rates up to 174MB per second - almost three times as fast as previous generations and perfect for film and video, music, and other drive-intensive operations. "

-- Taken from the apple store blurb on the hard drives in the system configuration.

If you only want to stripe, it sounds like you don't need to use an even number of drives. OSX will stripe 3 of them together. So buy a smaller drive for your system, save some cash, and put 3 500gb hdds and you can get "up to" 174mb per second. I would imagine sustained sits around 120ish, but that's just a guess that could be optimistic -- I don't really know anything about OSX's RAID.

So if you put 3 500 GB drives together in a RAID, what is the totaly amount of disk space you will have available? Isn't there some redundancy that eats space?

So if you put 3 500 GB drives together in a RAID, what is the totaly amount of disk space you will have available? Isn't there some redundancy that eats space?

RAID-0 doesn't provide any redundancy, so you won't lose space to that. With any file system, it takes space to create a structure which allows the OS to find the files, so you won't get exactly 1500GB of space using 3 500gb drives. The loss should be minimal. I don't know enough about the file systems / raid controller that macs use to give you an exact number.

I can't find wheather the new mac pros take the new 750gb drives. if they do, then that means 2.25tb in the three raid 0 drives- nice start for hd video.

3 drives in a RAID 0 config will work great. As with all current hard drives, the capacities quoted are based on 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes and not the 1,048,576 bytes that make a megabyte within a binary addressing system. So real world HDD capacities come into play and you lose approximately 7% of the advertised drive space because of this. Formatted capacity of a "500GB" hard drive is about 465GB on both Windows and Mac platforms. Very little is lost to overhead and OS/filesystem stuff (about 8 to 24 MB in most cases). In a Mac Pro with 3x500 in a RAID-0 volume, that would give you about 1,397GB to work with.

Here is some interesting information.
http://appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1958
http://appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1957

Architecture of the Mac Pro:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/Mac_Pro_0608/Articles/M43_0906_arch.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004479-BCIGAACJ

hwm

I can't find wheather the new mac pros take the new 750gb drives. if they do, then that means 2.25tb in the three raid 0 drives- nice start for hd video.

They will support the drives just fine, but quantities are limited and I'm guessing the drives haven't passed all of Apple's QC checks just yet. But no reason someone couldn't buy them from a third-party supplier and hook 'em up. Apple will probably offer the upcoming 750GB and 1TB drives (due early next year) within a reasonable amount of time. It took them about 2 months to offer the 500GB drives from the time they started showing in the consumer channel. ...Apple's a bit slow on adding new components, but you know that whatever they are offering will just work.

I know very little about the insides of Macs, but wouldn't it be possible to, instead of having two super drives, just replace one of them with a systems drive? I presume they just use a normal 3 Gbps SATA bus?

That way you could have your four RAID drives for media, a super drive and a systems drive? I'm presuming if the new Macs are anything like my old PCs, you can just put the hard drive in the same spot as the super drive would have gone.

Better yet, you could just buy a firewire burner (I presume firewire dual layer DVD burners exists?), and have 6 SATA hard drives in there and 2 ATA/100 drives.

Oh yeah, why can't the system drive just go on the ATA bus anyway? Will that bring down performance?

Anyway, I could just be talking rubbish. As I said, I know very little about the inner workings on Macs.

Actually, thinking about it, from memory, optical drives use parallel ATA connections whereas hard drive uses serial ATA busses. Opps!

I guess I was just talking rubbish...

Actually, thinking about it, from memory, optical drives use parallel ATA connections whereas hard drive uses serial ATA busses. Opps!

I guess I was just talking rubbish...

Actually you're not...

The Mac Pro appears to have 4 SATA2 (3Gbps) connectors for the 4 intended HDD locations. It also appears to have two additional SATA2 connectors up front for the optical bays as well as two ATA/100 connectors. This gives them the freedom of using EIDE/ATA or SATA interface optical drives or whatever else is mounted in the two front bays. I don't think the answer will be known for sure until someone gets their hands on a Mac pro to try some of this out. But unless there are specific restrictions within the system BIOS/ROM that prevent alternate uses for the frontal ATA and/or SATA connectors, there's no reason these couldn't be used for hard drives or other devices as well. Should be entirely possible to leave the optical drive in one bay and the system drive in another (just use a 5.25" drive bracket to fit the 3.5" HDD in that space), thus leaving all 4 primary HDD locations open for use as a RAID volume.

If anyone wants to contribute donations so I can buy a new Mac Pro, I'd be happy test all this out and post a detailed review. ;-)

So if you put 3 500 GB drives together in a RAID, what is the totaly amount of disk space you will have available? Isn't there some redundancy that eats space?

I was going to post a detailed description of the various common RAID levels (0,1,5) but found that Wikipedia has a good article on RAID configurations and does a better job than I would have anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

A couple of points to note about RAID 0 arrays:

- With RAID 0 there is no data redundancy which means your data is not safe from disk failure. If one disk goes then the data on the other disk(s) is usually lost as well.

- With RAID 0, the total array space is determined by the smallest drive. So, a 250 GB drive and a 500 GB drive will not create a 750 GB array. Instead, it creates a 500 GB array (250 + 250). Therefore, if setting up a RAiD 0 array, always use disks of the same size.

A couple of points to note about RAID 0 arrays:

- With RAID 0 there is no data redundancy which means your data is not safe from disk failure. If one disk goes then the data on the other disk(s) is usually lost as well.

Yep. However, regardless of which sort of disk configuration is used, it's always wise to have a good backup strategy in place. I've lost RAID-5 arrays when a PSU goes bad and fries 3 of the 5 connected HDDs. Poof - gone.

- With RAID 0, the total array space is determined by the smallest drive. So, a 250 GB drive and a 500 GB drive will not create a 750 GB array. Instead, it creates a 500 GB array (250 + 250). Therefore, if setting up a RAiD 0 array, always use disks of the same size.

Not necessarily true. Some newer RAID controllers (even the Adaptec and Mylex SCSI RAID controllers from 10 years ago) would allow mismatched capacities to be used in a striped volume. I haven't tried it with OSX, but within Windows NT, 2K and XP, the software RAID allows for specifying different block and stripe sizes for each drive and it's entirely possible to combine a 500GB and a 250GB to form a 750GB stripe set (RAID 0) configuration. While I've never done it with a 250 and a 500, I have built systems with mismatches such as 20GB + 30GB to get a 50GB volume.

Now, just because it's possible, I would not recommend it. To provide the best performance and reliability, it would be best to use drives of equal capacity within the RAID configuration. I manage tons of systems and have my full share of failures every year. I've become anal enough that I won't even RAID drives together in any form of stripe set (RAID 0, 3, 5, 7) unless the drives are the same make and model and preferably from the same production series.

Yep. However, regardless of which sort of disk configuration is used, it's always wise to have a good backup strategy in place. I've lost RAID-5 arrays when a PSU goes bad and fries 3 of the 5 connected HDDs. Poof - gone.

Boy, isn't that true. RAID 5 or any other RAID with redundancy should not be considered a backup strategy. Any "backup strategy" that includes actively using your data--or the possibility of doing so--is not a backup strategy.


Not necessarily true. Some newer RAID controllers (even the Adaptec and Mylex SCSI RAID controllers from 10 years ago) would allow mismatched capacities to be used in a striped volume. I haven't tried it with OSX, but within Windows NT, 2K and XP, the software RAID allows for specifying different block and stripe sizes for each drive and it's entirely possible to combine a 500GB and a 250GB to form a 750GB stripe set (RAID 0) configuration. While I've never done it with a 250 and a 500, I have built systems with mismatches such as 20GB + 30GB to get a 50GB volume.

Now, just because it's possible, I would not recommend it. To provide the best performance and reliability, it would be best to use drives of equal capacity within the RAID configuration. I manage tons of systems and have my full share of failures every year. I've become anal enough that I won't even RAID drives together in any form of stripe set (RAID 0, 3, 5, 7) unless the drives are the same make and model and preferably from the same production series.

This is good information, Jeff. I guess I know it is possible in certain circumstances to create mismatched capacity RAID 0 arrays but I never thought it a good idea. Your suggestion of always matching capacity, make, and model goes even a step further. It sure makes sense.

Hey, what do you know! I did know somethink about the insides of Macs after all! I'll put that down to a lucky guess...

I just had a look at the link Heath posted previously. It confirms what I thought:

In addition, the Mac Pro has two unpopulated 3 Gbps SATA buses for expansion.

So yes, I guess you can set up a 4 drive RAID for your media, have two super drives installed, and still have room for a mirrored systems drive (on the two additional SATA buses).

I can't wait to get the cash together and replace my eMac with one of these beasts! I'll be able to store a hell of a lot of HDV!