This post from Tyler Ginter is definitely a worthwhile read if you’re at all interested in digital video cameras and obtaining that ‘filmic’ look. It’s especially relevant if you have a DSLR that shoots video or a camera which allows you to adjust the shutter.
For a lot of Mac Pro owners, especially video editors, step number two when a new Mac Pro comes into your possession is to slap in three more drives in the empty drive bays (step one being the unpacking, setting up and fawning over). From that a full-contained 3-disk striped scratch/capture array can be built for just the price of the drives. Maybe you even pop in an eSATA extender to an put extra port(s) on the rear for external drives or a JBOD. All full up. Right?
Not exactly. For those of you with a need, it’s rather easy to create a 4-disk array and keep your boot disk inside, as well. (You could always use an external eSATA boot drive, but where’s the fun in that?) And, you can even keep that [single] external eSATA port. Unless you’ve used up that empty optical bay up top with a blu-ray burner or something, you have some room to grow here.
What you’ll need:
IMPORTANT: OK, one thing I need to tell you now that you may hear to the contrary — You do not need to remove the riser card bay to do this! Yes, you should probably pull out the riser cards (and definitely pull the power cable!), but that’s it. The riser car bay need not be unscrewed. You need only remove:
That’s it. Some guides will have you remove too much. Trust me… it’s not as hard as some sites make it out to be. I had all intentions of pulling mine apart and doing a step-by-step photo guide, but then I saw this excellent guide for getting at the guts by Michael Smith. It covers it all quite well. The only difference here is that you will be putting your 3.5″ boot drive, mounted on your 5.25″ sled kit, where he’s putting his optical drive. And, again, perhaps putting in that eSATA bracket on the remaining port while you’re in there.
I’ll wait here while you go do that part… OK. Done? Good. Leave Michael a nice comment, while you’re at it, eh?
Once you’re done moving your boot drive to the optical bay, hooking up the cables, and closing it all back up, you’ll need to put four disks for your array into the 4 empty drive trays. I would not recommend mixing drives of different sizes as it will likely affect your overall storage size and an odd drive may slow down the array as a whole. I highly recommend all the drives be of at least the same size and class, if not the exact same models.
So now you need to create this dang array, right? Well, I won’t punk out and send you elsewhere for the pictorial guide this time. So, fire up the Mac Pro, clear any disk initialization messages and open Disk Utility.
One of the things you’ll have to work out for yourself is block size. In general, larger block sizes are best for things like video where most of the data being read and written is in large chunks. If, however, you plan to use this array for gaming or database storage — in other words, applications which make many, quick calls for small chunks of data — then you’ll want to use a smaller block size. You mileage will vary, but my general, unwarranted suggestions would be: If World of Warcraft or Apache or MySQL will sit on this array, a 32k block size is probably a safe choice. If you’re reading/writing a lot of DV or HDV video, 128k is a fairly safe bet. If you’ll be working on RED or 2k footage, you might want to try 128k or even 256k blocks.
So let’s get to it:
STEP 1
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STEP 2
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STEP 3
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STEP 4
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STEP 5
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STEP 6
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STEP 7
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STEP 8
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And… there you go. You now have a 4-disk striped array inside your Mac Pro. If I’lve left anything out (or too vague), please leave a comment and let me know.
-Maggie
When Seagate announced their 1.5TB hard disk (oddly still placed in the Barracuda 7200.11 family instead of a new category) a few months back, you obviously expected lots more space. But I don’t think any of us, at least at first, expected more performance to boot. But it turns out that the Seagate ST31500341AS is, in fact, a faster drive than its 1TB and 500GB predecessors — by quite a bit.
Yes, this is not an ES2 ‘enterprise’ disk, for those already scoffing at it. Being an AS drive it is still considered a consumer driver. But bear this in mind, the MBTF listed for this drive is 750,000 hours. That’s pretty damned good for a commodity drive, and 250,000 higher than previous family models.
Now… about that speed. Quickly I’ll not that Tom’s Hardware witnessed burst of speed up to 127 MB/s in their tests. Of course, burst numbers are almost meaningless, but they do give you a sort of feel for the underlying performance to be had. So I’ve done some quick tests to give you an idea of what this drive is like in the real world. In that regard, I’ve included all the usual speed test suspects, but included numbers from John Flowers’ new HD Speed Test (Unscale.com) for those of you whose drive use involves digital video.
