SSD for MAC PRO QUAD (Early 2008)

I would not spend US$300 for the Sonnet Tempo PCIe slot mount card.

--------

The biggest performance increment you get is from establishing a Boot Drive on ANY drive.

This reduces contention for the Boot Drive _AND_ stops fetches of

System Data, Preferences, and Paging from

ruining the performance and throughput of your Data drives.

If your Boot drive is a fast rotating drive, such as a Velociraptor, There is an Incremental performance increase.

If that drive is a low-latency SSD, there is an incremental performance increase.

The main SATA slots ARE limited in bandwidth, but most single SSD drives will not overtake that limit.

--------

Save the money you were going to spend on the sonnet card. Try it without. You can always add it in later.

See my post above about how/where to install these drives with/without brackets.

There are lots of ways to include in your strategy, starting with what is most limited.

Some ideas http://www.macperformanceguide.com

RAM: 32-48GB for working with large image files

PCIe SSD for SCRATCH!

4 x 4TB for your media files

Yes SSD have near zero latency seeks but does a boot drive benefit the most from that? some yes, so would a 250GB 10K VR from WD (180MB/sec).

Even with 32GB RAM CS6 still uses a scratch volume so create and use one and never use the boot drive for scratch.

A graphic card can help too, more VRAM the better and one that handles CUDA is a good investment for many, so $320 in a GTX 570 2.5GB or more memory card.

You could use the Sonnet or another, and host your scratch on it.

PS: the 2008 has some limitations. Enough so plan to or realize you may have or be outgrowing and to prepare to move to a new system if/when they come out.

Performance issues are bit complex. There is no one gadget you can buy that will make it sit up and Zoom through your work.

In my opinion you need three general things:

• Establish a Boot Drive, with only System, Library, Applications, and the hidden unix files including Paging/Swap. all other files are moved off to other drives.

MacPerformanceGuide originally put his Boot Drive on an EXTERNAL drive, and he found it made so much difference, he said would never run without a separate Boot Drive again.

• Make sure you have enough RAM that you are not dipping strongly into Virtual memory (except occasionally).

On a 2009 or later Mac Pro, you can add one, two, or three 8GB DIMMs (about US$90 each) right away, and add more later if that is not enough. MacPerformanceGuide says go for 24GB or more.

• Add drives so that your SOURCE and DESTINATION are on separate drives, so they are not competing with each other.

This give MUCH more speedup than getting involved in RAIDs, and most users set up ONE RAID holding both Source and destination, which provides no improvement over simple drives.

** and if you are running PhotoShop, I needs to be configured (set its internal parameters) for fastest performance.

.

You can read my post on SSDs and older Mac Pros here. I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and it feels "new" again. Might find it useful.

• Add drives so that your SOURCE and DESTINATION are on separate drives, so they are not competing with each other.

This give MUCH more speedup than getting involved in RAIDs, and most users set up ONE RAID holding both Source and destination, which provides no improvement over simple drives.

** and if you are running PhotoShop, I needs to be configured (set its internal parameters) for fastest performance.

Can you go into more detail about this or point to an article that does? Especially the PSP configuration? Thanks!

For photoshop configuration:

http://www.macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html

Optimizing Photoshop CS6 Performance

The best hardware and configuration for Photoshop CS6.

1. Photoshop CS6 Performance Configuration
2. Speed Up Saving and Opening Photoshop CS6 Files
3. Photoshop CS6 diglloyd Benchmarks
4. Are 12 CPU Cores Faster Than 6 with Photoshop CS6?

Optimizing Photoshop CS5 Performance

The best hardware and configuration for Photoshop CS5.

...and there is much more on that site. Llloyd has an ax to grind (a small one) and pushes Hardware from vendors that make him some commissions, but his fundamental assessments seem sound.

Old school has not changed totally.

Use to need scratch array to make up for RAM. You still use RAM for virtual scratch just like then along with fast scratch disk volumes and arrays.

That means for some just a small investment, for others, it means 48GB RAM along with superfast SSD scratch arrays hanging on a PCIe 6G controller.

Never allow the boot drive to be used for PS scratch (unless it is a large SSD and also a must, you just don't have the RAM and alternate disk that is also fast).

Use to be you spend a fortune $2K+ to have a SCSI array just to get to what a small SATA2 SSD can do for $100 today for scratch. A $160 240GB SSD for scratch and one for system.

And 24-48GB RAM.

Want more? get a 2.5GB VRAM CUDA GTX 570 (or above) to help. GPUs and GPGPU should, could, be leveraged a lot more and better - like give us some 8-pin connectors and support two dual-width cards, an ATI 5770 uses one 6-pin, leaving just one free 6-pin aux power connector available.

Adobe has an FAQ on CS6 of course. You start there.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=adobe+cs6+faq

Processors and RAM memory have gotten much more plentiful and much faster. Hard Drive have only gotten somewhat faster.

Many Pro users end up cursing their processor, when what is really happening is a Traffic Jam that ensures when both the Source file for a production process and the destination file for the finished product are on the same drive.

The SATA Bus is typically not a bottleneck. A single rotating drive can move data at around 100 to 125 M Bytes/sec in a Burst. But it also spends a very long time just getting the read/write heads to the place where the data are located. Once at that location an entire track can be read. If you get extremely lucky, an entire track could be written. Then the drive heads have to move again, and you have to wait while the drive seeks.

On a good fast drive, that could be 10 milliseconds each time the drive head has to move. If data were available, it could be transferring another 10 M Bytes in that enforced dead time.

If source and destination are the same drive, you start a read, then it may be interrupted by a write. The drive has to move the heads to a completely different area of the disk. You need a seek over there. When the write is complete, you need to seek back to do another read. You need a seek back there.

You spend a lot of time moving the drive head back and forth, and less time than optimum amount of time just reading or just writing.

If you had two drives, one positioned to read the next SOURCE block, one positioned to write the next DESTINATION block, the whole process can proceed much faster.