Buying my first PTHD rig

[tdblanchard]

I'm making the leap to HD...
PTHDx
HDio 16x16
HDio 8x8

My question is about how to best rebuild my Mac Pro.
It's a 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 12 GB RAM.
I've ordered three brand new hard drives to do a clean OS build.
1 256gb SSD
and 2 1tb ESATA's.

We won't be doing any crazy-high track count stuff (24 at-a-time tops) but will probably be utilizing quite a few VI's (we also pre-ordered Komplete9 Ultimate).

Any advice on partitioning and such would be super-helpful.

Thanks in advance!

[tdblanchard]

Did I post this is the wrong forum/section?
Hello?...Hello?...Hello?...

[Darryl Ramm]

Its unclear what you are exactly asking about. Basic disk layout is covered already in lots of avid recommendations.

For any new computer build today I'd be using SSD for everything except if I had to handle large videos or had large online audio archives.

I would not be sub-partitioning any drives, no benefit and may make things worse. The main reasons for partition is to multi-boot or for some specialize backup reasons. If you don't know of those/have a specific reason then don't (Well Lion or Mountain Lion will create a separate recovery partition on the system drive, but that does not count...)

Following basic pro Tools setup...

OS X on one SSD
samples on another SSD (hope they will fit.. if not buy two)
sessions on a third SSD

(and here we mean a drive (with one partition), not put on different partitions on a shared single drive).

You have purchased one of the most demanding VI packages out there and spent many many $k on HDX and HD IO interfaces. Why skimp several hundred dollars on SSD drives? I just don't get it.


Hope you have time to return the spinny toys and get some high-end SSD storage, especially since you are doing heavy VI workloads.

Definitively do clean installs of OS X from scratch, good call, don't clone or migrate the system. Use this chance to give your computer a needed colonic.

I'd use Samsung 840 Pro SSD drives. Enable TRIM in OS X for these drives (Google how to do that) and leave about 20% unallocated space on each disk when you format them.

Did you really mean eSATA? or SATA? And exactly what model SSD? And other drives did you get. The devil is in those details.

All should fit inside the box. eSATA or other external cabling is a bit of a PITA so I would avoid that.

I would see how this goes, but you also might consider in future adding an SATA III 6 Gb/s PCIe card since the Mac Pro is only SATA II.

Given how pathetically behind the times Mac Pros are I'd be saving up and planning on buying the new Mac Pro when it appears. I'm assuming Apple will finally fix this issue. All the SATA III SSDs should move across just fine.

Darryl

[tdblanchard]

Thanks for the reply Darryl!
Yes, total colonic for the CPU is well in order.

The SSD I ordered is the Samsung 840 Pro SSD.
But it's SATA III (So are the "spinny" ones, for that matter).
They'll still *work* though, right?
You're probably right about how I shouldn't be skimping out after spending all that loot on the HDx rig, but I'm down to the last bit of cash here.
You've now 80% convinced me to send back the "spinners" as soon as they get here and dropping the Amex for the SSD's

The Komplete 9 bundle is >370gb so that's 2 SSD's right there.

What do you think about the OWC 3G's?

Help!

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by tdblanchard

Thanks for the reply Darryl!
Yes, total colonic for the CPU is well in order.

The SSD I ordered is the Samsung 840 Pro SSD.
But it's SATA III (So are the "spinny" ones, for that matter).
They'll still *work* though, right?
You're probably right about how I shouldn't be skimping out after spending all that loot on the HDx rig, but I'm down to the last bit of cash here.
You've now 80% convinced me to send back the "spinners" as soon as they get here and dropping the Amex for the SSD's

The Komplete 9 bundle is >370gb so that's 2 SSD's right there.

What do you think about the OWC 3G's?

Help!

I don't know of anything horrible (except the general performance difference) about the OWC 3G drives and i think highly of a lot of OWC stuff. But the Samsung 840 Pro drives are really excellent and have measured performance significantly higher than the OWC. In my book, so much faster to make it not even worth considering. I've used a couple of generation of Samsung SSD and think highly of their support, ability to get firmware fixes etc.

You can get 512 GB 840 Pro drives, so if the Komplete 9 is only ~370 GB it should fit fine on a single dedicated sample drive (currently $471 on Amazon). Given how heavy/demanding NI VI stuff is I would definitely do that. With such a high-end system otherwise its just a false economy. For this setup I'd probalby go SSD first for the sample drive (assuming you are doing heavy VI), then SSD for system/boot and finally SSD for the session drive, that's the least important. But in reality I can tell you I would just buy all three as SSD now. But if you are using a spinning disk make sure it is something high performance like a WDC Caviar Black, definitely no "green drives" (WDC Caviar Green are just a disaster with Pro Tools.).

SATA III drives SSD or spinning will work fine on SATA II or SATA I interfaces. Backwards compatibility with SATA is fantastic. And for sample drives in particular with lots of random IO you may not notice much of a difference at all, its large sequential IO where you will tend to first hit a SATA II limit. I would just use the on board SATA II unless it proves a problem then you could look at PCIe cards, but you have a lot more to worry about first.


Darryl

[tdblanchard]

Alright Darryl.
I ordered the 512 Samsung 840 pro.
So what I have planned is to have the 250gb ssd for the OS and software, the 512gb for the sample library and the "spinners" for my sessions.
If need be, I can upgrade the spinners to SSDs down the road.
I'm now officially tapped for cash
But I get your point(s) and also don't want any of my engineers giving me the stink-eye.
I'm super-pumped to get this rig.
It should be arriving either next weekend or early next week.
I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot from me after that
Cheers!

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by tdblanchard

Thanks for the reply Darryl!
Yes, total colonic for the CPU is well in order.

The SSD I ordered is the Samsung 840 Pro SSD.
But it's SATA III (So are the "spinny" ones, for that matter).
They'll still *work* though, right?
You're probably right about how I shouldn't be skimping out after spending all that loot on the HDx rig, but I'm down to the last bit of cash here.
You've now 80% convinced me to send back the "spinners" as soon as they get here and dropping the Amex for the SSD's

The Komplete 9 bundle is >370gb so that's 2 SSD's right there.

What do you think about the OWC 3G's?

Help!

You might want ask EJ Wells what he thinks of the OWC SSD's

[tdblanchard]

Originally Posted by sunburst79

You might want ask EJ Wells what he thinks of the OWC SSD's

Who?