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Mac Pro 2010 upgrade
- Thread starter mavericks7913
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I have no doubt that if you add a 4 ports card, you want to use all 4 ports and even with a hub. However, the question is will you really consistently use up all bandwidth. A monitor require USB 3.0 for what? As a hub? As a channel to control volume, brightness? It won't (and should not) use up lots of bandwidth, right?
NAS can be connected via network cable, but even if you use USB 3.0, connection, unless it's a very high speed RAID array / or SSD inside. It should not able to fully utilise all bandwidth. Also, are you require to consistently keep copying something to / from the NAS?
Anyway, it's not how many USB device connected, but how much bandwidth you need. You can connect a scanner, printer, mouse, keyboard, few USB drive, a joy pad, a hub, a monitor, an external HDD, a NAS.... but still not even fully utilise a single FL1100 chip's bandwidth.
e.g. a Single FL1100 can provide 500MB/s bandwidth
3 USB drive use 150MB/s (50MB/s each), via a USB 3.0 hub
external HDD use 100MB/s
NAS use 200MB's
So, even though you use all of them at max speed at the same time, the system still has 50MB/s for the mouse, printer, scanner, etc. Those only require very narrow bandwidth. 50MB/s is more then enough. And this is base on you can fully stress all those storage at the same time. In general, that won't happen very often.
BTW, it's your choice, if you want to get the more expensive Sonnet card, please go ahead, my comment was based on that a general user rarely require that much bandwidth. However, only you know what you are going to do, if you need it, buy it.
Too late. All Mac Pros had been sold within 5 min. And only students can buy it.