Q: Upgrade the components in a Mid 2010 Mac Pro tower for editing 4K & Cinema Raw Video

For Memory, you can upgrade up to 128G

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Mac-Pro-Memory#1333-memory

For Video Card: NVIDIA Quadro K5000 GPU for Mac is capable 4K Display.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA959LL/A/nvidia-quadro-k5000-gpu-for-mac?fnod e=53

For SSD: 960G or more if you install them as RAID 0:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/

For USB3 interface card(There's no thunderbolt interface card for Mac Pro 2010):

http://www.macworld.com/article/1165672/add_usb_3_0_to_a_mac_pro_with_highpoints _rocketu.html

RAID is not a good solution for backup. It is wasteful of drives without providing significant increased reliability. You would be better served by having multiple different backups on those same multiple drives.

Also, you are ignoring some of the fastest built-in drive bays by dedicating them for backups (which are allowed to be quite slow) rather than live data.

Using a separate Source drive and a separate Destination drive in the internal bays is plenty fast enough -- you do not need to go crazy with everything on external SSDs.

Upgrading the video card is a part of the equation, as is fast input and output, but the processor does come into play here.  Assuming your 2010 5,1 Mac Pro is out of warranty, opens up some interesting potential.  Mine was a dual quad 2.4 Intel Nehalem X5630 pair of chips. These just weren't enough, even with a bumped up video card (I also have 32GB of memory)

While not for the completely faint of heart, upgrading the processors in these incredible machines is about as straight forward as it could be, and there are videos out there on youtube that take it step by step.  There are also vendors who will do the upgrade for you by having you send in your processor tray (without the memory) and they take care of cleaning things up, installing new processors, etc.  In my case, having built a number of computers, I picked up a matched pair of X5680 3.33 Hex Core processors .. so I'm now running 12 vs 8 cores at 3.33 (without boost) vs. 2.4.  The effect on both watching raw 4k and editing it is amazing... I can get smooth viewing even from a USB 2.0 connected memory card.

Again, just throwing this out there as most of our machines have long gone out of warranty and this is a fairly easy upgrade.. BTW, the price for a used pair of 3.33 processors was $250..  with a 30 day warranty..  and with the right thermal paste, I'm actually running cooler than the 2.4 processors were running both at idle and under heavy load.

Thank you Apple for building us such a great base machine to work with..  :-)

According to my own conversations with MacVidCards even though Nvidia make some video cards which can be used in a Mac Pro 2010 which do have in theory a HDMI 2.0 port e.g. the GTX-980 the Mac does not support using this port in HDMI 2.0 mode. As a result you cannot do 4K at 50 or 60fps via the HDMI port only 30fps or a lower resolution i.e. 1080p.

What you can do is get a Mini Displayport to HDMI 2.0 adapter which does support 4K at 50 and 60fps.

See - http://www.club-3d.com/index.php/products/reader.en/product/mini-displayport-12- to-hdmi-20-uhd-active-adapter.html

You can fit either a single SSD to a PCIe adapter, see - http://barefeats.com/hard183.html but I believe this approach may be limited to 1TB per card.

Or there is now a the Amfeltec Squid PCIe adapter which supports 4 SSDs and you can combine these in a software RAID to both create a single bigger volume and get unbelievable speed. See - http://barefeats.com/hard210.html you could then use 4 x 1TB SSDs to get one effectively 4TB drive with four times the speed.

There is no way to get Thunderbolt on a classic Mac Pro. You can get USB3.0 via a suitable card. Some cards seem to have driver issues but the following are all listed as officially supporting El Capitan.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/allegrousb3pcie4port.html - this shares a single bus for all four ports

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/allegroprousb3pcie.html - this has four separate busses

http://www.caldigit.com/Fasta-6GU3plus/ - this is also USB3.1 compatible and is currently the only USB3.1 card for a Mac Pro

Great link on Mini Display Port/HDMI Adapter.  For storage, you can also get a SATA 3 full 6G card and 6G raid enclosure and 6G SSDs from OWC.  Slightly faster than HDMI 3 Adapter (which I also got at OWC).  Thunderbolt would be nice though..  Still direct to PCIe is pretty fast.  :-)