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NOT HAPPY with iMacs lack of connections , will an Older Mac Pro make me happier?

T

tears2040

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 27, 2010
401
1
I have a current iMac i3 which speed/performance wise is excellent, no problems.



Now the problem I do have is with it's lack of connectivity and the pain the
ass it is to open up and do any kind of future upgrades. Since my money is limited I was thinking about maybe selling my new iMac i3 and getting an older Mac Pro such as this one

http://cgi.ebay.com/APPLE-MAC-PRO-X...le_Desktops&hash=item1c15a5b664#ht_2884wt_913



The advantage is clear with the connections, quad processor etc. The disadvantage is it's older technology ( 2007 ) and slower ram + I believe slower processor as well.


Please someone help me out

thanks
 
sushi said:
Can you be more specific?

What lack of connectivity are you referring to?

What kind of upgrades in the future are you looking at?
Click to expand...

Fire Wire 400 , 800 , eSata


Imac only has one firewire 800 port. I am currently using this connection as for an external drive with Final Cut Pro. The problem is I would love to have an eSata option which at least on this iMac model to my understanding is not possible. I know they sell firewire Hubs which can be connected to the iMac via firewire
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/

But that's working all of of the firewire 800 bus initially and I really don't know performance wise how it would do. Also firewire Drives/enclosures are more expensive and slower compared to eSata



A Mac Pro ( 2006/2007) is older technology and I understand that, but at least I could be able to place four internal Hard Drives inside of my system + have multiple firewire and eSata connections from this machine. So as of now my only pro connection is one firewire 800 port which imo is really lacking compared to even an older Mac Pro
 
Firewire can be daisy chained (256 devices, in theory) without much if any performance hit. One port simply limits you to purchase external drives, etc. that have an IN and a THRU.

A hub should do the same thing- it's just daisy-chaining the devices. You might want to look at getting the iMAC with the SSD option.

-iamthinking
 
Ack!

I can relate.

I went from a G5 that had 2 internal 1.5 TB drives, two external USB drives for offline storage for a total of nearly 5 TB.

That being said the Firewire 800 port is an option, the other option is an older used Mac that can store these drives and you would connect to them via gigabit ethernet which is again faster than Firewire 800.

One thought. I ordered a Firewire 800 dual bay powered case this morning (to hold the two 1.5 TB drives from my old G5) as my G5 died earlier this week. A dual case allows for two large drives that would work for your purposes:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEPT934AL2C/

You could put twin 2tb drives in there for 4tb. You could theoretically daisy chain it to another FW800 bay of the same type but we'l go with one for now.

Another thought is: have the superdrive removed and placed in a USB powered case and use its Sata connection to connect to another SATA drive. Just a thought. No need for superdrive to have sata-speed. Use the superdrive slot to snake the SATA cable out the rear of the cpu.
Have a 2 tb in there and you've got 6tb.

Another thought is upgrade the internal drive to a 2 TB model. That's another thought. Then that's 8 tb.

Anyone else have any other ideas? There's, to my knowledge, no real good NAS solutions for the Mac at this time though that would be preferable in some respects.
 
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