Ideal Mac Pro 4,1 upgrades -- cost vs benefit

Question

Level 1

0 points

Ideal Mac Pro 4,1 upgrades -- cost vs benefit

Hi all,

I would love some input on what to upgrade for my Mac Pro 4,1 to squeeze the most out of it performance wise for a fixed budget of about $3K. I'm leaning towards an internal PCIe RAID card + a bunch of SSD and spinning disks. My current configuration is as follows (* next to what I am contemplating upgrading / replacing).

Mac Pro 4,1

Yosemite 10.10.3

2x2.93 Dual Quad Core processors

64 GB OWC 1066 RAM

Apple Raid Card (*)

NewTech Esata Card (*)

NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 (*)

Dual OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro SSD RAID 0 -- Optical Bay using Softraid*

Quad Hitachi Hds722020ala330 2TB Hard Drive, 7200rpm, SATA 3.5 -- connected to Apple Raid Card as 4 terabyte RAID 0-1*

Dual monitors (Apple 30" and Apple 23").

External Drobo S currently with 5 2 TB commodity drives

Many external hard-drives !!! in enclosures or bare with a NewTech Voyager Q reader

I've looked at these and other forums for CPU, SSD, PCIe Host adapter and PCIe Blades. My question is given a particular starting point, what is the best bang-for-the-buck for my particular use case (see below "USE CASE"). I do notice my disk I/O is particularly slow with about 200 MB/S read/write on the 4TB spinning platter RAID and some severe wait times loading and unloading Genomics data or large Aperture Libraries so I'm definitely going to get rid of the Apple Raid card!

Short of buying a new MacPro and maxing it out I'd like to really upgrade the current machine to last for at least another 3 years (maybe even 4 which would put it close to a 10 year lifespan!).

I would love suggestions on these potential choices:

Speed and expand the internal I/O + storage

*Areca PCI mini-sas RAID card with two internal sas to sata ports connected to both

*4x1TB SSDs in optical bay

*4x4TB platters in raid 01 in standard bay with known vendor solution

Some combination of above + PCIE blade like Samsung XP941 SM951?

Buy a new video card for parallel processing (which one would be a great price / cuda performance)...

Get a faster externally facing PCIE Sas Card to connect to a raid exclosure + future proof data?

Maybe use all the extra 2TB drives I will have laying around in some sort of cold-storage idea...

Thanks for your thoughts and sorry for the long post!

***USE CASE

I am a scientist and photographer and my use case is basically 50% big data (genomics, remote sensing) workstation with parallel processing and disk I/O important (possible use of CUDA in future but not a priority now) and the rest a very large digital photography collection, photo programs include the aging Aperture and a future forced switch to alternative products. I'd like all my highly accessed data organized well and onboard my home directory. I'd like blazingly fast access to genomic data for I/O, both sequential reads and writes as well as random I/O. Genomic data sets can be up to a terabyte. I would also like very fast access to my photo libraries. I'd like internal redundancy and external Time Machine Backup.

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jun 17, 2015 4:01 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jun 17, 2015 4:14 PM in response to cbfly

Don't RAID your boot Drive -- put it on a single SSD. Best performance is from the latest PCIe-direct SSD on a carrier-PCIe card.

Mirrored RAID is not Backup. You still need a backup, to cover crazy software, program errors, people errors, and "just because" errors.

User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive

User Tip: Mac Pro silver tower (2006-2012) Replacement Graphics cards

.

Reply

Answer 2

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Jun 18, 2015 5:42 AM in response to cbfly

Take a look at site references, he is VAR but also high-end photographer and has excellent ideas to optimize and configure

http://www.macperformanceguide.com

The PCIe-SSD blade (Apple-Samsung 1TB, XP941 or SM951) devices are "game changers" and the easiest way to get past the current IO bottlenecks.

_PCIe adapters instead of controllers can send and shuffle data into and back from memory faster.

Blade type SSDs in classic Mac Pro offer 1500MB/sec. The cMP will be held back by not having PCIe 3.0, and sometimes balancing two blades (using slot #2 and #3) does not double thruput.

I would drop the idea of using SATA II with SSDs unless you want large SSD volume (JBOD) for some reason.

I have no respect for the Apple (Pro) RAID card. None. No support for 4TB and above, lots of -problems, and not a good use of your PCIe slot. External RAID6: then yes with Areca or ATTO or whoever has the crown currently. And no to OWC controllers! or their SSD device.

Dual 3.4GHz 6-core maybe? 56xx support for 1333MHz RAM as well as people have found there is support for 160GB RAM. I would think 64GB is not ideal in your environment.

GPU: GTX 980 EVGA using two 6-pin power connections.

A couple blades and use SoftRAID 5.x for all your drives.

Highest density drives like 6TB are fast, especially if you cut them in half! and use part of the drive (and can grow into using full drive later if needed).

The 6,1 nMP is looking "old" at nearly two years. And there are other boxes of course that can run non-Mac OS but have plenty to offer.

PS: You need something much much more reliable and stable than TimeMachine!! CCC definitely but also a mirror RAID6, two arrays of your proojects and media when the size and value and access/speed is critical and you get into larger volumes. For now, some 6TB drives? And when it comes to SoftRAID 5 mirrors, use three drives for a mirror not the minimum of 2.

Reply

Answer 3

cbfly Author

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2015 1:06 PM in response to The hatter

Thanks Hatter,

For the PCIE upgrades here's a partial plan based on your responses:

Slot 1: swap in the GTX980EVGA in slot 1, nice card it has 2480 cuda cores!

Slot 2: A working e-SATA card for now to go to my drobo S (which I really don't like but it is working as TMBU). Ultimately I should probably put a SAS external card + an array here but that would break my budget right now.

Slot 3: For slot three it sounds like I should move my boot to the XP941/SM951 type card, or do you like the intel cards better?

Slot 4: (dump the Apple raid card): Options:

i) I was specifically curious about using the areca ARC-1883i PCI-Express 3.0 x8 SAS RAID Adapter connected to two different RAIDs: one with the SSDs for the very large home directory (4TB) and one with the spinning platters (what size/type ? 4x6 raid 01 is simpler than raid 5/6 no?) with a redundant RAID setting, both internally using the backplane power connectors from a well known vendor. What do you think of this setup, can the throughput for SSD RAID 0 really be >= 1.5 Gbps?

ii) You suggest another blade, can I get a blade bigger than 512 GB that you recommend? This could actually wait ... until these get much less expensive.

for option ii) Then I would use SOftRAID 5.x for all other drives (these would be on existing SATA in drive bays (4) Optical bay (2 now, could go higher). How fast could the I/O be for a reasonable raid in existing bays in Softraid? What drives would you pick?

As far as the CPU + RAM upgrade:

>Dual 3.4GHz 6-core maybe? 56xx support for 1333MHz RAM as well

>as people have found there is support for 160GB RAM. I would think 64GB is not ideal in your environment.

What would be price of this upgrade be including a lot of RAM? Probably more than 3K alone, no?

Also RE: 6 TB drives, I could use these for external cloned backups of the 4TB internal raid and system, but for now this would be through an eSATA toaster so it would be slow. Maybe every week?

Thanks again!

Reply

Answer 4

cbfly Author

Level 1

0 points

Jun 18, 2015 1:09 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Grant,

I have done step #1, for step two, once my home directory became greater than 2 TB I stopped cloning that drive and only used a DROBO S for Time Machine. I know, that's pretty shaky, so that's why I'm trying to figure out something else.

See my response to Hatter's suggestions!

Thanks again!

Reply

Answer 5

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Jun 18, 2015 1:46 PM in response to cbfly

Apple style 1TB blades are almost double the cost of 512GB SM951. There is no Intel blade that supports Mac. There should be 2TB units for $1500 later this year 🙂

A 5690 is cheap today, not $3K for a pair - more like $300-400 (if that). Not sure what 32GB DIMMs, those are not cheap.

Keep it simple

The system does not need to be huge volume. No need for an array on SSD. One for system - 500GB is usually over kill - and PCIe SATA III is slower and limited.

One PCIe-SSD is as fast and a lot better and easy than dual controllers using two slots and four SSDs (old style). That is outdated like using SCSI controllers and 8 15K or 10K Cheetahs (and use to cost in the $2k and up ballpark).

The PCIe bus seems to only be able to handle just so much traffic - GPU and blade(s) and SAS/SATA RAID card, and what is not needed are a couple expensive Sonnet Tempo Pro SSD controllers or something. - a blade does not use a controller, it is just an adapter and miracle ! the Mac Pro has had this support in it since the beginning since 10.5 - in its firmware and board.

Take one step, knock down one wall and see what happens. Systems today are mostly IO bound. Memory helps get data into and out of the processor and yes sometimes it does need 100GB RAM to work at its best (rare but large data sets or graphic images and libraries).

Glad you seem -pleased at the specs of Nvidia high end card.

Reply

Answer 6

cbfly Author

Level 1

0 points

Jun 19, 2015 8:40 PM in response to The hatter

Hi again,

Thanks for your input:

> A 5690 is cheap today, not $3K for a pair - more like $300-400 (if that).

I see a lot of directions and chip suggestions...to go to a dual 6 core (5690) what are the best 'how-to' guides with purchase list and installation instructions?

>Not sure what 32GB DIMMs, those are not cheap.

I cannot find a link to a running Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 with > 128GB ram, do you have a link? It wouldn't really be worth the $$$ to upgrade without a clear path to >128 GB I think (I could go 128 now and put in more 32GB DIMMs later...

BTW we have a server on site with 512 GB ram so I'm not sure the CPU + RAM upgrade is really the best use of my large but limited 3K budget.

>The PCIe bus seems to only be able to handle just so much traffic - GPU and blade(s) and SAS/SATA RAID card

How would it handle the new video card, a 512 GB blade and a new RAID card for the SSDs?

It looks like the Areca card I cited could become a single point of failure if I had it working both for an SSD RAID (internal) and a spinning RAID (either internal or external). But I do need at least 1TB very fast access data for photography and 1TB very fast data for genomics, and swapping in and out data around is really inefficient for me so I do want to find a 4TB SSD solution for 'near' data...at > 1Gb/s...

>Keep it simple

Finally can you suggest which 6TB hard drives you would use? I could put these into the standard drive bays and just use Softraid as you suggest. Raid 5 is going to be more complex than RAID01 no?

Have a great weekend!

Reply