Buying a Used Mac Pro

I've got a the same 2.66 dual core machine and it's great. I've got a sonnet esata card with 2 ports and 4 drives installed internally. And I've got 12 gigs of RAM. There are supposedly "sweet spots" as to how much ram to install. I got some recommendations and went with 12. Gotta say, there are times now where I think adding some more would help. Particularly when I'm working with multiple programs open in Mavericks.

I've got both snowleopard and mavericks startup disks so I can switch back and forth between OS's. I've also got a black magic intensity pro card for monitoring with a flat screen television via hdmi and to a standard def broadcast monitor via component.

I'm thinking about installing an SSD card to create a faster boot drive.

It's a great machine and for standard def it's probably more than adequate. Just finished working on a 2K feature with prores 4444 material and although rendering was required with most effects, it worked just fine. That material was on sata drives on an external 5 bay esata enclosure.

ENIGMACODE wrote:

Adding/modifying/improvising; I pride myself in just that.

You're not alone; my first G5 got a SATA card (internal 1TB RAID and later a 2TB external RAID) high-end graphics card, I/O expansion...

I'm in the process right now of looking for a 2008 or 2009 Mac Pro for my wife (and as a back-up for my '08 MP.)

I favor the 8-core '08 systems (lease returns) that are starting to show up on eBay at $600-800.

I've been doing RAIDs since before the turn of the century and love them, but unless you need really fast (400+ MB/sec) data you can save time and money by just adding a USB 3.0 card and buying 2-4TB USB externals. Virtually all the new drives are USB 3.0 and very affordable.

If you want to go eSATA, you can get the "bulkhead fittings" (cable connector plates so you don't have to sneak the cables out) for next to nothing.

hope this helps

I've heard that there were serious compatibility issues with usb3 cards and macs. Any truth to that? Certainly seems like a worthwhile purchase otherwise.

Apparently there have been a few issues, though most seem to be on the new Macs (people expect more when they've just spent money. 😉)

I spotted this What is the state of USB 3.0 on Mac Pro? - MacRumors Forums

which seems to be pointing to problems with specific chips.

I don't use mine continuously (probably because of the 8TB internal array...) but it seems to perform well.

and which card do you have? Do you transfer large files? I don't know if you've ever had a drive drop off the desktop while copying a large file. I had my startup drive get totally trashed once when it happened.

Mine is a RocketU HighPoint Dual USB 3.0 for Mac

Yes, last weekend I cloned all the data (about 250GB) off a pair of G4 Dualies that have finally found a good home.

Yes, I've had a few random quits, even one when cloning a system drive, but no data losses, just error windows and then restart.

I suppose that upgrading to Lion or Mountain Lion (definitely not going to touch Sea Lion er, Mavericks any time soon) might help, but I am still running some apps that probably won't survive the move... And I'm not at all sure those are "upgrades" since I have no iToys. 25 years on Mac and I still score a FAIL on the "digital lifestyle" cr@p... LOL

as far as rendering, utilizing compressor with qmaster makes an enormous difference.

http://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/using_compressor_with_multiple_cores. html

Not sure how much difference the macpro model makes otherwise.

ENIGMACODE wrote:

I think I get this: "25 years on Mac and I still score a FAIL on the "digital lifestyle" cr@p..."

Are you insinuating that some of us still do not need all those mobile apps to make our lives complete?

I'm an old f@rt who lives in the stix in the middle of 15 million people... I'd have an analog cell phone if they made one. One of the saddest days of my geek life was when they took "Computer" out of Apple's name.

If you want rendering power, an 8-core system with a high clock rate is the way to go. If you can squeeze out the extra green for a 2009 MP, it'll be even nicer; it uses the Nahalem processor that supports hyperthreading, so you can have as many as 16 virtual cores. And it has improved PCIe speeds.

For really crazy performance, you'll need to (ultimately) move to FCP X or some other NLE that supports 64-bit operation.

On the other hand, if you set up your 8-core MP correctly, you can expect to transcode 'SD' footage to MPEG-2/AC3 at 3-4X real time... hehehe