What do you think about the new Mac Pro?

[slughead]

It's not really 90 seconds, more like 5 minutes. Anyway, if you prefer the old way, that's all you. With everything inside, you're still limited to about 4 drives.

External expandability is better too with the old design. You can buy this PCIe card, which has more bandwidth than all the thunderbolts on the new Mac Pro combined.

Personally I prefer to be able to hot swap my NAS drives while leaving everything on. With Synology, you can now build 24 or 36 drive volumes. I'd take that RAIDed solution over internal drives any day.

Is there some reason the old Mac Pro can't do NAS, in addition to the internal drives?

 

[kappaknight]

External expandability is better too with the old design. You can buy this PCIe card, which has more bandwidth than all the thunderbolts on the new Mac Pro combined.

Is there some reason the old Mac Pro can't do NAS, in addition to the internal drives?

I never said you couldn't do NAS with the old one, but if that's the direction of where things are headed, then one can see, at least I can, why Apple is taking away multiple drives from within the unit and moving all the drives for storage to the outside of the unit.

Back in the old days when I had a Windows computer with C:, D:, and E: drives, it was a pain in the ass to manage it all. While OSX makes this simpler to manage, it can be further optimized to keep similar components in one spot vs. multiple spots.

Anyway, all I know is I was not interested in the Mac Pro with the large towers; even though I do have large storage needs. The new design however, did make me do a double take and look into this a bit more. Whether it's marketing, or good design, or a combination of the two, I'm looking forward to picking one up.

 

[theSeb]

Stuff like this will make the transition to a new Mac Pro much easier.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpressiii.html

I finally have an excuse to get a rack into my home office!

For those worries about losing internal storage...

http://www.rentaraid.co.uk/areca-arc-8050-thunderbolt-to-6gb-s-sas-raid-storage.html

 

[slughead]

For those worries about losing internal storage...

http://www.rentaraid.co.uk/areca-arc-8050-thunderbolt-to-6gb-s-sas-raid-storage.html

.. $1,348? Wow.

Also, I hope you're only using some really slow hard drives with that, the bandwidth is about 1/3 of what it would need to be to max out 8 x 6Gbps SATA (it's only 2 thunderbolt channels--2GBps).

I'll see your underpowered box and raise you a Home built array - holds 15 drives for ~$400 -- plus this four port SAS controller ($480).

Total ? $880, holds nearly twice the number of hard drives, and has four times the bandwidth. The New Mac Pro literally doesn't have the thunderbolt bandwidth to run that kind of setup.

 

[theSeb]

Don't try to convert UK prices directly into US $.

Most people are not hobbyists willing to buy "home built solutions" and then play tech support.

I am not following your last assertion. Please elaborate with actual figures of 4 TB2 ports as I am too lazy to look this up right now to refresh my memory.

 

[Larry-K]

It's not really 90 seconds, more like 5 minutes. Anyway, if you prefer the old way, that's all you. With everything inside, you're still limited to about 4 drives.

Personally I prefer to be able to hot swap my NAS drives while leaving everything on. With Synology, you can now build 24 or 36 drive volumes. I'd take that RAIDed solution over internal drives any day.

I did one last week, It's 90 seconds unless you're developmentally challenged, and a screwdriver confuses you. The bay opens with a latch and there are no screws involved in pulling the trays.

I've got six drives in mine and it's easy to add another four. That doesn't preclude having an external enclosure, it just supplements it.

The "Old Way", that's funny, today's children are so eager to pull a pejorative out of their little lexicons.

 

[flowrider]

For me, this is a BIG Ho-Hum. Really the first Apple product, in a long time, that I have not anticipated. It's not for me!

Lou

 

[slughead]

Don't try to convert UK prices directly into US $.

Most people are not hobbyists willing to buy "home built solutions" and then play tech support.

I am not following your last assertion. Please elaborate with actual figures of 4 TB2 ports as I am too lazy to look this up right now to refresh my memory.

... Sure, let me just do all the work for you

TB2 will likely top out at 2-2.1GBps (gigabytes, that is), or roughly 1GBps per channel. However, the New Mac Pro will only have three controllers for all 6 ports. Each controller will have only 2 channels. This means the 6 ports will actually be sharing around 6-6.6GBps and not 12. This is why an 8GBps PCIe slot (8x PCIe3.0 or 16xPCIe 2.0) has more bandwidth than all the nMP's TB ports combined.

The array you showed had 8 hard drives hooked to Two thunderbolt channels--the equivalent of One Thunderbolt 2 port. SATA III is 6Gbps, which is 0.75GBps, so 4 drives per thunderbolt channel means the potential of 3GBps (4x0.75) running over each 1GBps channel. If your hard drives are fast enough and being used all at once (as in a RAID situation), they're going to hit the ceiling of thunderbolt at 1/3 the speed they are capable of (1GBps instead of 3GBps).

Of course, most platter drives don't max out SATA III and probably wont max out a thunderbolt channel in a 4-drive RAID0. So as long as you don't buy any SSD, you wont have anything to worry about I guess.

You are still, however, paying way more for an enclosure which has half the capacity and 1/4 the speed of a 15 drive setup you can put together yourself in 10 minutes with minimal tech knowledge.

 

[garirry]

Rumors say that Apple will make another keynote on october 15th. We'll see about everything.
What I wish:
Low-end model - Mid-end model - High-end model
1899$ - 2499$ - 3499$
256GB (SSD) - 512GB - 1TB
8GB (RAM) - 12GB - 16GB
Xeon E3 (4-core) - Xeon E5 (6-core) - Xeon E5 (12-core)
All models same AMD FirePro

I don't really know anything about Xeon and FirePro CPU/GPUs so, sorry
We'll just have to wait and see.

 

[handsome pete]

Rumors say that Apple will make another keynote on october 15th. We'll see about everything.
What I wish:
Low-end model - Mid-end model - High-end model
1899$ - 2499$ - 3499$
256GB (SSD) - 512GB - 1TB
8GB (RAM) - 12GB - 16GB
Xeon E3 (4-core) - Xeon E5 (6-core) - Xeon E5 (12-core)
All models same AMD FirePro

I don't really know anything about Xeon and FirePro CPU/GPUs so, sorry
We'll just have to wait and see.

The starting point is anyone's guess, but I'd imagine it being closer to your $2500 mid-range estimate. But you're probably way off on the high-end. The12 core CPU costs $2800 alone.

 

[DisMyMac]

I just hope they "get it right". No overheating, odd graphics issues, and (of course) delays delays delays....

 

[slughead]

The starting point is anyone's guess, but I'd imagine it being closer to your $2500 mid-range estimate. But you're probably way off on the high-end. The12 core CPU costs $2800 alone.

That's not to mention the FirePro. A single W9000 is $3,500. While they probably won't charge $7000 extra for dual W9000, even if it's $2000, that'd still be insane.

 

[theSeb]

... Sure, let me just do all the work for you

TB2 will likely top out at 2-2.1GBps (gigabytes, that is), or roughly 1GBps per channel. However, the New Mac Pro will only have three controllers for all 6 ports. Each controller will have only 2 channels. This means the 6 ports will actually be sharing around 6-6.6GBps and not 12. This is why an 8GBps PCIe slot (8x PCIe3.0 or 16xPCIe 2.0) has more bandwidth than all the nMP's TB ports combined.

The array you showed had 8 hard drives hooked to Two thunderbolt channels--the equivalent of One Thunderbolt 2 port. SATA III is 6Gbps, which is 0.75GBps, so 4 drives per thunderbolt channel means the potential of 3GBps (4x0.75) running over each 1GBps channel. If your hard drives are fast enough and being used all at once (as in a RAID situation), they're going to hit the ceiling of thunderbolt at 1/3 the speed they are capable of (1GBps instead of 3GBps).

Of course, most platter drives don't max out SATA III and probably wont max out a thunderbolt channel in a 4-drive RAID0. So as long as you don't buy any SSD, you wont have anything to worry about I guess.

You are still, however, paying way more for an enclosure which has half the capacity and 1/4 the speed of a 15 drive setup you can put together yourself in 10 minutes with minimal tech knowledge.

Thank you - very kind. I have been very slack in reading about TB2, but your explanation in the first paragraph does not seem correct to me, but that could be just my ignorance and I am too busy with work rubbish to do some reading

 

[VirtualRain]

Thank you - very kind. I have been very slack in reading about TB2, but your explanation in the first paragraph does not seem correct to me, but that could be just my ignorance and I am too busy with work rubbish to do some reading

Here's another way to word it... Each TB controller multiplexes 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0 for data peripherals (2GB/s) and Display Port together and makes that available on two ports. The new Mac Pro has 3 controllers (6 ports).

TB2 adds support for Display Port 1.2 which can support 4K displays. The 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0 for data peripherals remains unchanged. However, an artificial cap (related to channel data rates) that was present in TB1 is removed in TB2 (thanks to aggregating the channels into one) providing support for the full 2GB/s that 4 lanes can offer.