Imac vs. Mac Pro thoughts and concerns

[Dism]

Originally Posted by Craig F

I think you're expecting to much of SSDs but YMMV

I concur. SSD is still too new and expensive to really be used in a system, yet. For the same price you could easily get a HDD with 3 times the storage space, at 7200+ with a sizable cache. I'd give it another year or so before seriously considering SSD for audio.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by Dism

I concur. SSD is still too new and expensive to really be used in a system, yet. For the same price you could easily get a HDD with 3 times the storage space, at 7200+ with a sizable cache. I'd give it another year or so before seriously considering SSD for audio.

But for 128 track playback at high edit density, it's likely that you would need 2 or 3 of these HDDs to be able to keep up. Check out glyph's pro tools track count tests on this page:

http://www.glyphtech.com/support/trackcount.php

The HDDs are clearly better for recording high track counts, but look at how horribly they perform with playback of high track counts/edit densities.

Now compare the specs of the glyph SSD to some of the newer ones and you'll see that the glyph is much older tech:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233087

I can invest in 3-4 HDD's to work at high edit densities, or spend about the same on an single SSD that will handle the same. Smaller amount of space, yes... but I'm not a fan of huge drives anyways, I would rather backup more often for piece of mind.

Considering how much money I have spent on hard drives, external cases, etc. in the last 10 years I don't think that dropping $400 on an SSD will be any worse of an investment than the pile of SCSI stuff I'm about to ebay at a major loss. In the unlikely event that the SSD doesn't work out for an audio drive I can always use the it for streaming samples or as a boot drive. See you on the other side.

[chrisdee]

Your modification sounds interesting, but you loose your warrenty if you do this don't you ?

[chrisdee]

For me there are two deal breakers reguarding the new imac. No esata port and the one firewire port. This really restricts it's possibilities.

A two hd option would be great also. SSD system disk and regular sata disk for data/recording.

Think I'v mentioned this befor

[CodyAtCaptive]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

maxing out your RAM to 16GB.

With the new Mac Pros you can get up to 32 gigs of RAM, I believe.

And by the way, this is a great thread and is making me take another look at a decision I thought I'd figured out. I was leaning towards an iMac because it's about half the price of what I would spend trying to get the MacPro.

But only having one FireWire slot bothers me. Especially with no PCIe slot to add more. With this option, how would I hook up a FireWire DAW and a FireWire external harddrive to record to?

I've read people talking about daisy chaining. Would that work in this situation? If so, how?


Thanks,
Cody

[CodyAtCaptive]

Ah, the Quad-Cores get upto 16 gigs and the 8-cores get up to 32. Now I see.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by CodyAtCaptive

With the new Mac Pros you can get up to 32 gigs of RAM, I believe.

Only with the 8 core. The 4 core only has 4 RAM slots, so 4GBx4 is all it can handle.

Originally Posted by CodyAtCaptive

And by the way, this is a great thread and is making me take another look at a decision I thought I'd figured out. I was leaning towards an iMac because it's about half the price of what I would spend trying to get the MacPro.

But only having one FireWire slot bothers me. Especially with no PCIe slot to add more. With this option, how would I hook up a FireWire DAW and a FireWire external harddrive to record to?

I've read people talking about daisy chaining. Would that work in this situation? If so, how?


Thanks,
Cody

You can daisy chain multiple firewire devices off of one port. The firewire spec allows up to 63 devices per bus.

Originally Posted by chrisdee

Your modification sounds interesting, but you loose your warrenty if you do this don't you ?

If it goes back for warranty just put the optical drive back in the way it was. Looking at the ifixit teardown it doesn't look like there are any warranty voiding stickers when you open it up.

[CodyAtCaptive]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

You can daisy chain multiple firewire devices off of one port. The firewire spec allows up to 63 devices per bus.

Does that mean that I can have, for example, a FireWire DAW plus the External FireWire harddrive that I am recording to both hooked up and functioning properly to the iMac through its single FireWire port?

If so that's great.


Thanks

[getz76]

Originally Posted by CodyAtCaptive

Does that mean that I can have, for example, a FireWire DAW plus the External FireWire harddrive that I am recording to both hooked up and functioning properly to the iMac through its single FireWire port?

If so that's great.

It has always been that way.

All current Macs which have FireWire ports (i.e., MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro) have a single FireWire bus. So even thought Mac Pro has 4 FireWire ports, there is a single bus and therefore no difference between daisy chaining and plugging devices into the separate ports.

[youbringmesuffering]

another thing to look at, is you can always get a stripped down Mac Pro. As long as you invest in the Processors you want, you can get the minimum RAM, HDD, and you don't really need high powered Video unless you're working with video. Then, every paycheck, you can go to newegg and get a little bit of RAM and a drive and slowly upgrade. i haven't been on in a while but when i was upgrading my older MACPRO (2007 series), RAM was ALOT cheaper than what Apple was selling it for.