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1-2tb SSD for MacPro?

H

houser42

Junior Member
Hi all,

New to the forum, did a search and found no obvious answers.

I may be able to justify the purchase of 1-2tb of SSD storage for a workstation Mac Pro 3gb SATA.

I would assume getting two 500gb to raid is faster than one 1tb?
2 tb would be good for expansion, but 1 tb will do though...if it does not make sense to buy something bigger while I am at it..
Also assuming that each will need it's own sata slot, and I probably can only spare one slot...

Anyone done it? Cool in Mac Pro w OSX 10.6.3xx. ?
Any recommendations on where to look?

thanx and regards!
j
 
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AFAIK those are the only SSDs you can get at that size, and that is why they are so expensive. Cost per GB for SSD is ~$4 so 1000GB = $4000.
 
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the devices you're talking about are $4500-5500, and cannot be made to fit inside 2.5". Ask again in 5 years.
 
you can prob get a 500gb one why not just get a external and tape it to your lappy =P

id say ask in 2 years at most not 5 hehe
 
Maybe he might have too much money to burn, but the main question here is, what exactly does he plan to do that justifies that amount of SSD capacity? If it's general storage it really is a rather inefficent use of cash. Only reason is if he's running some massive database server (which I doubt, as I wouldn't use a Mac Pro for that) or he's doing some major video editing in Avid all uncompressed.
 
I say ... capex or grant money? 🙂

If you really have the money, I'd suggest skipping SATA entirely and looking at fusion-io's line of products, or maybe even a RamSan. In that category, you start seeing some ridiculous stuff like 1 TB/s (yes, T) transfers, millions of IO/sec, etc. But there's "entry-level" stuff too.
 
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😀
Funny but true..I tend to do too much too soon..

The application is streamed musical samples which I do for a living.
That's a scenario where this kind of performance is extremely useful.
Now.

It's real world and now..just very expensive...but now quite as expensive as you say either. You can get a 500gb SSD for around $1400 now if you look..
I will probably wait until summer though...as the competition is just starting..

thanx for the jokes:sneaky:
peace

StinkyPinky said:
Houser42 has so much money he's invented a time machine. Hence he's asking from the future. Circa 2014.
Click to expand...
 
I'm not sure what "streamed musical samples" are, but it does sound like a scenario where sequential reads are more important than sequential r/w, so some raided HDDs should be a good alternative and most of all affordable..
 
thanx for reply,

Raided HDDs is what I use now and seektime and bandwidth is the bottleneck now.
It is basically music with large orchestrations with several hundred files played back simultaneoulsy with various amounts of overlap and such. Believe me..SDD makes sense in this scenario...
thanx again
 
Well, if you raid enough SAS 15k drives together - you can get the sequential reads of a high performance SSD raid.
 
It's real world and now..just very expensive...but now quite as expensive as you say either. You can get a 500gb SSD for around $1400 now if you look..
I will probably wait until summer though...as the competition is just starting..
Click to expand...
Get an 80GB SSD and use it to cache a RAID array of 2TB drives.
 
fusion io will fit in anything with a pci express x8

I could see spending $20K for a terabyte but oh damn would it be fast.
 
houser42 said:
thanx for reply,

Raided HDDs is what I use now and seektime and bandwidth is the bottleneck now.
It is basically music with large orchestrations with several hundred files played back simultaneoulsy with various amounts of overlap and such. Believe me..SDD makes sense in this scenario...
thanx again
Click to expand...

You using Digidesign Pro Tools I assume? How many tracks do you run at the same time? Don't know what sort of performance gain you expect by getting 2TBs worth of SSDs. The only advantage in using SSDs in Pro Tools i can think of is a reduction in lag time if you like to do a lot of sudden skipping/seeking during playback.

Does your projects reach anywhere near 2TB? If not you might better off running a SSD/mechanical combo. Use the SSD for the current project you're working on, and then use the mechanical drives for storing projects that you're not working on.
 
Thanx all, really appreciate it!

Ayah,
I may get sustained read with a 15K SAS raid but I will never get near the seektime which is crucial here also.
Its that and the parallell reads I am after that mechanical drives can't do at all.

Makajin,
Yes Protools.
The audio in that is not the problem, I can run 196 tracks which is more than I need off standard 7200 Barracudas. It's the virtual instruments that are the bottleneck. As the VI:s are just now going 64-bit, I can load large instruments and the thing that chokes now when enough voices are streamed off the drives is what stops the flow now..

SSD are actually recommended by some of the makers of VI:s now.

thanx again
j

Makaijin said:
You using Digidesign Pro Tools I assume? How many tracks do you run at the same time? Don't know what sort of performance gain you expect by getting 2TBs worth of SSDs. The only advantage in using SSDs in Pro Tools i can think of is a reduction in lag time if you like to do a lot of sudden skipping/seeking during playback.

Does your projects reach anywhere near 2TB? If not you might better off running a SSD/mechanical combo. Use the SSD for the current project you're working on, and then use the mechanical drives for storing projects that you're not working on.
Click to expand...
 
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