A 4K capable graphics card.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

I first wrote of the Zotac nVidia GTX660 graphics card used in my Mac Pro back in my Hackintosh days. That Zotac card has proved to be outstanding, cool running, silent and capable of simultaneously running four displays (2 x DVI, 1 x DP, 1 x HDMI). When I migrated to the 2009 Mac Pro the Zotac joined that migration and except for the lack of the cog wheel/splash screen on a cold start of the Mac, the card was compatible in every way.

My displays are rather dated Dell 2209WA IPS panels, 21″ in size, and I use three. Eventually these will give way to two larger 4K panels once the technology settles down but with a far higher pixel density (3840 x 2160 vs. 1680 x 1050 computes to 4.7 times the number of pixels for a like sized screen) I will go from 21″ to 30″ or so, and the factor increases to 9.6 times. That’s a big increase.

The EVGA has only one fan, yet the card is much larger overall.

Thus I decided to get the best ‘Made for Mac’ card out there, the choices being the ATI Radeon 7950 or the EVGA nVidia GTX680 both ‘Made for Mac’ variants selling for some $600 new. I like the external connector choices on the EVGA more and found a used, mint GTX680 on eBay for $450. I doubt you will go wrong with either. There are yet faster cards but not in ‘Made for Mac’ editions and power consumption becomes an issue, many of these really requiring auxiliary power supplies if they are to be driven hard and if damage to your computer is to be avoided.

The power consumption issue:

The EVGA GTX 680 requires the use of two auxiliary 6-pin power cables connected to the backplane board, in addition to the power provided by the double-width PCIe slot. Each of these runs at 12 volts and can deliver up to 75 watts of power (6.25 amps of current – more than that and you risk frying things).

The two 6-pin connectors attached to the backplane board. I use 1/2″
flex tubing to neatly dress the cables. The PCIe fan is on the right.

The EVGA card I bought came with two six pin cables while the card itself has one six-pin and one eight-pin socket. The instructions clearly state that the 8-pin will accept a six-pin in one orientation only and this proved to be true.

One of the 6-pin connectors goes in an 8-pin socket at the card end.

GTX680 installed. The Apricorn PCIe card with the boot
SSD is below and the powered Orico USB3 card below that.

Installation in the double-width Slot 1 is a breeze, and no tools are required. It took me some 10 minutes, most of that spent unplugging and replugging cables to the Mac Pro. As with the GTX660, the claw at the rear base of the GTX680 is retained by the sliding bar activated by the push button on the PCIe fan’s casing, the latter being moved back for removal and installation, then pushed back into place, making for a secure fit for this large and heavy card.

Why Slot 1? Because inserted in any other slot your card will block a free slot. Not good, considering there are only four PCIe slots available in any Mac Pro.

Static current draw in PCIe slot 1 is 2.95 amps (35 watts) compared with 2.46 amps (30 watts) with the GTX660. An immaterial increase and the new card seems every bit as silent as the old one which was outstanding in this regard.

About This Mac.

The full splash screen appears on cold start, allowing choice of boot drive if the Option key is held down during start. This was a black screen in the GTX660 so boot drive selection had to be made in System Preferences->Startup Drive before restarting. It’s nice to have the splash screen back, but hardly a reason to upgrade, especially as I never turn off the Mac Pro, preferrring to let it sleep. Adventurous hackers can buy a stock PC GTX680 and, using Windows, flash its ROM for the splash screen functionality. As I do not use Windows, and as there is no circumstance under which I can see that changing, I opted for the ‘Made for Mac’ flashed card – though the appearance of the casing on mine suggests it’s actually a flashed PC version. There’s no difference in use. It’s not the first, nor the last, time that a vendor on eBay has lied. For new cards there is negligible price difference between Mac and PC versions and the Mac version will work fine on PCs.

The PCIe fan spools up to some 1500rpm on cold start then quickly settles to the stock 800rpm idle in under 30 seconds:

Noise at ear level (3′ from the front grille) measures at 43dB, the same as with the GTX660, whether idling or under stress.

Benchmark tests:

The most stressful tests for graphics cards include Unigine Heaven (now in 4.0 guise) and the recently released Unigine Valley (v. 1.0), and I show comparisons with the GTX660 below. All run using OS X Mavericks 10.9.1. The GTX680 is 73% faster on Heaven and 10% faster on Valley:

With two X5650 12-core CPUs performance is much the same as with two X5590 8-cores:

This is as expected. These are GPU tests, not CPU tests.

How about power consumption under stress? Using Unigine Heaven as the most stressful test, the current draw from the three sources (PCIe plus the two 6-pin connections) measured thus (worst cases shown):

That total power use of 52/63/42 watts, respectively, meaning 157 of a total permitted of 225 watts – is 70% of overall capacity. But individual percentage of capacity is equally important here – you can be under in aggregate but over on one source, a danger point. With each limited to 75 watts, the highest use noted was the 63 watts on 6-pin slot 1, or 84% of capacity. Given the very stressful nature of this test and the short-term peak power use, I remain satisfied that the health of my Mac Pro is not threatened.

With Unigine Valley, the maxima noted were 51/37/41 watts, for a more modest total of 129 watts, and a worst case use of 68% at the PCIe slot.

Monitoring the 1,000 watt Mac Pro power supply, I never saw power use exceed 500 watts during the Unigine Heaven test, a mere 50% of capacity.

GPU temperatures:

I cannot report on these as the GPU sensor is not ‘seen’ by the system. However, the power draw readings, above, are a fine proxy for determining GPU stress, and the permitted maximum power draw is not exceeded here.

Real world subjective use with Lightroom 5.1 and Photoshop CS5:

I’m not one much for subjective data. “It feels faster” is usually the placebo effect at work. But here are my subjective observations with LR and PS, applications I use all the time.

Lightroom is a key app for me and I actually noted a perceptible improvement. The occasional “Loading …” flag when flipping fast through 1:1 previews (I would get it 30% of the time) and the associated 2 second delay has now fallen to 2-3% of the time and a consistent 1/2 second delay.

When exporting a file from LR to PS, the longest part of the process is rendering of the PSD file from the RAW original in LR, before it can be opened in PS. With the GTX660 this took 6 seconds. With the GTX680 it’s down to 2.5 seconds – much faster and a noticeable enhancement to workflow smoothness and speed.

Are these improvements enough reason to upgrade? That’s a function of your patience threshold and the state of your pocket book. You will not go wrong with the slower GTX660 but once you have used the GTX680 it’s tough to go back. If your budget is $200, the GTX660 is unreservedly recommended. A new GTX680 is three times as much.

Comparison with the new Mac Pro:

Will the GTX680 match the D300/500/700 dual GPUs in the new Mac Pro? Once test data are available we will know and I will update the metrics above. If it lags, I would guess it will not be by much. Either way, you will have a great deal of money left in your pocket by sticking with the 2009 Mac Pro.

Now it’s time to start thinking about 4K displays. For a full list of nVidia GPUs which support 4K, click here.

Update May 27, 2014 – new OS X drivers: nVidia has just released a new driver which claims to fix all existing 4K issues. Click here.

Update June 6, 2014 – new Mac Pro:

Here’s Unigine Heaven running on the new Mac Pro (cylinder) with the 6-core CPU and dual top-of-the-line D700 GPUs. In a word – underwhelming, epecially given the very high cost of the D700s:

The premium for the D700 GPUs over the base D300 ones is $1,000, whereas a GTX680 ‘Made for Mac GPU’ for the old Mac Pro can be had new for $640, used for half that amount.

Update June, 2015:

The newest top-of-the-like Nvidia GTX980 card doubles the speed of the excellent GTX680 but also doubles the price – $600 new compared with $300 used for a flashed GTX680. Add a further $180 if you need the ROM in the GTX980 flashed to show the boot and option-start screens.

You can get it in many socket configurations from the usual vendors – Nvidia, EVGA, PNY, Gigabyte, Zotac, MSI, etc. – so choose based on your peripherals. I opted for a dual-DVI/DP/HDMI configuration, but if DP or MDP is your thing any number of multi-socket options is available.

For still photographers the GTX980 is overkill but for heavy video rendering using CUDA-capable apps it’s a must and the premium will be quickly recovered from enhanced productivity. You can read all about the GTX980 here and I recommend it without reservation. Performance is some 20% better than the costliest dual D700 option for the new (‘dustbin’) Mac Pro.

Meanwhile, a used, flashed GTX680 at $300 or less is an excellent choice for many users.

Looking better and better.

The best desktop computer from Apple. Ever.

The new Mac Pro:

With the new Mac Pro (the small, cylindrical one) due out very soon, the 2009-2012 models will become even better bargains. There are very few performance metrics yet available for the nMP and while it’s reasonable to guess that CPU and GPU performance will be fine, there remains a big question over cooling efficiency. Apple has gone from 7 (or 8, if your GPU has two) large fans to one small one to cool the nMP and having had three iBooks and two iMacs literally melt their GPU chips in my household, owing to Apple’s compromised heat engineering, you can understand my sensitivity about proper thermal design.

Further, quite why Apple has relegated storage to external devices with the nMP and focused on making a professional machine as small as possible quite defeats me. The small size is a solution in search of a problem (do you hear production pros complaining that their computers are too big?) but early adopters of the nMP will only do photographers a favor by flooding the market with the older machines and driving prices down in the process. Right now supply of the old 2009 Mac Pros appears tight as the word gets out just how special these Mac Pros are, but I expect that situation to change markedly in favor of abundant supplies in the near future.

The new machine will start at $3,000 (4 core) to $4,000 (6 core) and I would be prepared to wager that a loaded 6 core machine will easily hit 5 figures.

The old MacPro:

A mint 2009 can currently be had for $700 (one CPU) or $1,100 (two CPUs) and as I have illustrated at length on my blog these machines can be easily and cheaply enhanced with better CPUs, SATA III drives, SSDs, USB3, RAM, Blu-Ray DVD drives, etc. It would be hard to spend a total of much more than $2,000 on a loaded dual CPU machine which comes with more internal storage and expandability than you can shake a stick at. There is no point in getting anything other than an absolutely mint machine. The thought of waking up to a beater for the next 2,000 or so days of ownership and heavy use makes no sense for the insignificant amount saved. $100 off for scratches and bruises? Are you kidding me?

Earlier models of the Mac Pro are not a good investment at any price. The 2008 is marginal as additional RAM is costly, being of a special design, though it will at least run 64-bit applications using its slow CPUs. 2007 and prior are obsolete owing to their 32 bit designs which deny the best performance in the latest applications. The 2009 Mac Pro, single or dual CPU, is very much in the sweet spot for price/performance/upgradability. The 2010 and 2012 later models added faster CPUs and better graphics cards at significant increases in cost. Otherwise they are identical to the 2009, with the sole exception of the unique CPU socket design in the 2009 dual CPU model.

CPU upgrades:

The most cost effective CPU upgrades are currently the (non-Xeon) Core i7-980 6-core for the single CPU Mac Pro ($330 used – a far better bargain than the $600+ used Xeon W3680 with the same functionality and speed) and the Xeon W5590 3.33GHz 8-core for the dual CPU Mac Pro ($400 for a used pair). Either option increases CPU speed by 50%.

We can expect to see prices on 12-core paired X5680 (3.33GHz) and X5690 (3.46GHz) CPUs to come down quickly as these CPUs are discontinued and server room upgrades see a flood coming to the market. Google alone probably has a million awaiting sale …. Currently, for dual CPU machines the 12-core CPU pairs run $1,200 and up, making the modest performance boost over the W5590 a poor return on investment. I see no significant risk to buying used, with the better bulk recyclers offering money back guarantees. I lose count of how many used CPUs I have purchased and have yet to get a bad one.

While CPU upgrades in the 2009 dual CPU machines are tricky owing to the unique design of the CPU sockets, you can pay experts (like me – click here for details of my upgrade service) to do it right on a turnkey basis and take out risk from the equation.

Alternatively, for the DIY set, buy faster CPUs from my colleague Paul Opsahl who modifies CPUs for the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pros for very modest outlay using costly lab tools, making for a drop-in replacement.

Either approach is cost-effective for a machine which easily has a 5 year life expectancy with no excuses necessary for performance.

USB3 built in?

Adding powered USB3 through a PCIe card is simple, as I illustrate, but Paul is also working on a custom modification to the front panel USB2 sockets to make them USB3 and I hope to showcase his work here down the road.

Equalling Thunderbolt speed in the old Mac Pro:

About the only modification you cannot currently make to the ‘old’ Mac Pro is the addition of Thunderbolt connectivity for external devices. The technology seems to be centered on the motherboard and no cards are available for use in PCIe slots.

However, once you break through all the hype surrounding Thunderbolt (cost is high – reckon on $1,100 for a TB disk enclosure and cables compared with $200 for USB3), you realize that you can easily approach or exceed TB speeds through the simple expedient of pairing two SATAIII drives using an Apricorn card and striping them in RAID0 using Apple’s Disk Utility. Bingo! TB speeds at USB3 prices. So the non-availability of TB is hardly a deal breaker here.

Two old RAID0 120GB SATAII SSDs running in my Mac Pro.

The above shows speed test results for two RAID0 SATAII ancient SSDs inside my 2009 Mac Pro. Were these SATAIII drives attached to an internal Apricorn card ($50) then Read and Write speeds would double, with the results comparable to or superior to Thunderbolt.

Airport wi-fi upgrades:

A Broadcomm (Airport) card installed on the motherboard in a Mac Pro.
PCs use the same 802.11n card.

As regards wi-fi, the newest 802.11ac protocol found in the latest laptops, iMacs and the new Mac Pro should become readily available using plug-in USB ‘dongles’ before long. There are one or two out there already but early reports suggest some problems remain to be resolved. But I believe it’s just a matter of time before aftermarket solutions become available. Whether we will ever see a plug-in card for use in the motherboard of the old Mac Pro (and PCs for that matter, the socket being a standard PCMCIA one shared with PCs) remains to be seen. Now that would be nice as the user would get an integrated Airport-style solution, rather than having to use an auxiliary utility application.

Performance and life expectancy:

For even the most demanding users, I expect that the performance of a suitably modified 2009 Mac Pro will remain satisfactory for photographers of all kinds over the next five years. Maybe longer.

PCs have very much hit the wall of technological progress with innovation increasingly focused on mobile devices and applications. With PC sales and demand falling and with performance improvements stalling, the ‘old’ Mac Pro may have a very long life indeed ahead of it.

Parts supplies are not an issue. So many of these machines were made (I would guess production numbers in the low hundreds of thousands) that both used and new parts are easily found with the most common wear items – those with moving parts like fans, DVD drives, power supplies and disk drives – abundantly available.

Except for the 2009 dual CPU motherboard with its unique CPU sockets, parts for the 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pros are identical, though the single CPU versions use unique heat sinks and motherboards (‘backplane’ boards in Applespeak).

The 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pro – a machine of (very) few parts.

The best way to describe the fit and finish of these machines is to compare them with the 1959 Nikon F film SLR. Both are made to survive combat and neither should be dropped on your toe.

Some issues.

I installed the latest OS X release, the awkwardly named ‘Mavericks’, which purports to honor a surfing spot that no one but surfers have ever heard of, on my Mac Pro. I suppose ‘Yosemite’ would actually have cost Apple money given their stated aim of naming new OS X releases after famous California spots. Then again, they can always use Death Valley down the road when tablets have completely taken over.

The download (my broadband speed is 16mb/s) took 50 minutes then another 35 for the installation to take place.

Some observations germane to still photographers using multiple displays follow. I use three displays and my main photo processing applications are Lightroom 5, Photoshop CS5 and Snapseed. The computer I use is a 2009 Mac Pro with upgraded W5590 3.33gHz CPUs, USB3 and a SATA III Samsung EVO 256gB SSD boot and application drive, running in an Apricorn PCIe card.

Sleep: Sleep works a little differently. Whereas hitting the Sleep button on my wired Kensington Mac keyboard displayed the Sleep/Restart/Power Off/Cancel options under Mountain Lion 10.8.5, with Mavericks hitting that button immediately puts the Mac Pro to sleep. To wake the computer moving the mouse no longer does anything – both wired and wireless. Rather, the left mouse button has to be clicked.

EyeOne Display One: This one is a deal breaker if it does not work. Used with the EyeOne Display One colorimeter it works perfectly, which is amazing given that Xrite has discontinued this popular colorimeter and has an awful history of upgrading the application for the latest version of OS X.

iWork Numbers ’13 and iWork: The file format is changed and not backwards compatible with the previous Numbers ’09. You can save in Numbers ’09 format if required, but once you save in Numbers ’13 there is no way that you can load the file in Numbers ’09. Numbers, Keynote and Pages all come as updates but updating is optional as the old versions continue to run fine. However, if you are sharing iWork files with others, or with other machines, once you upgrade all other machines must be upgraded also. The UI enhancements in Numbers ’13 are an improvement though the clunky Numbers app will never equal Excel in sheer utility and portability.

Multiple display use: Apple has historically done a really poor job of supporting multiple displays. Mavericks maintains that low reputation. They have finally added the display of the menu bar on all displays, where it formerly showed on only one. A workaround was to use SecondBar but that only supported two displays, not three. If you set the menu bar to be solid (translucent is very hard to use) then the active display (the one last clicked) shows the bar with the other two (in my case) being shaded but just visible. Nice. Further, the Dock is meant to appear (or hide) on all connected displays but the code is faulty. I can get it to show on two displays and it’s not even consistent on which two. My three displays are connected using DVI (2) and Display Port (1) with an aftermarket non-Mac Zotac nVidia GTX660 GPU. The same faulty result occurs if you do not set the Dock to ‘Hide’.

Continuity across screens when dragging files is a mess.

File partially dragged to left display.

First, you can no longer extend a file across multiple displays. So that means that extra broad spreadsheets can only be viewed on one display at a time. What on earth was Apple thinking of here? Second, as you drag a window from one display to another, the dragged part becomes translucent on the destination display until most of the window is dragged over, changing eventually to solid. This makes it impossible to make that simplest of tests for consistent display calibration by part dragging a file acrtoss two displays and comparing colors. Bad, bad, bad.

After all the time Apple has delayed in fixing multiple display support this is easily the worst ‘upgrade’ in Mavericks and seems like an excuse to show off fancy coding than respecting user needs.

PCI fan: After a cold start this would spool up to 2100rpm and stay there for anything between 15 minutes to a couple of hours, before settling back down to 800rpm. Now the Mac Pro starts the PCI fan at 800rpm and keeps it there until an increase is needed. Good.

Moom: This is a key application for multiple display users, arranging windows in any one of a number of preset layouts. You have to go to System Preferences->Accessibility->Security & Privacy->Privacy to enable Moom after which it works perfectly. I highly recommend this application.

Sound over HDMI: On my other Mac Pro which delivers sound over HDMI, I had to reinstall the patch described here to get back the HDMI option in System Preferences->Sound.

Finder: This is another application which Apple has been very slow to update, finally adding tabs in the Mavericks version. But it still does not support splitting the Finder window into two screens which is a great help when moving files. So I am sticking with Total Finder which continues to work perfectly and whose maker does an excellent job of timely updates.

The ML Finder allowed you to color file names with the complete row showing the color chosen. An easy way to highlight often used files. Now the Mavericks Finder instead shows a small colored dot by the file name. Basically, the dot is so small as to be useless, defeating the goal of easy file location.

Useless color coding in the Mavericks Finder.

Photoshop CS5: CS5 does not load when you click it or try to round trip from Lightroom 5. To restore proper function download and install the Java update found here. No speed changes noted.

Safari: Comes in a new Version 7 with Mavericks. Some pages seem to load sluggishly but I do not have enough objective data.

Firefox Version 24: No issues noted.

Lightroom 5: No issues found. The first entry to the Develop module continues to take 5 seconds as code loads but remains instantaneous thereafter. No speed changes noted.

Printing: No issues printing to the HP DesignJet 90. As with ML, I print wirelessly, with the printer connected using USB2 to my (ancient) Airport Extreme router, some 35 feet from the Mac Pro, using Lightroom 5. (See the Comment, below, regarding incompatibility with the Epson 3800).

Other commonly used apps: Carbon Copy Cloner (backup app – update required), AppCleaner (update required), Snapseed, Excel 2011, 1Password, Fingerprint (wireless printing app) and Vienna (RSS reader) all work fine with no need for updates. iTunes and Digital Camera RAW Compatibility both require (free) updates. Dropbox, MakeMKV and Mac BluRay Disc Player continue to work well.

Geekbench: This app tests CPU and RAM speed. The best reading in ML was 19,700. This is my result in Mavericks – 0.8% slower. Historically this improves with subsequent OS releases during the life of a major release:

Operating temperatures: No material changes noted.

Should the still photographer upgrade? There are no tangible benefits from upgrading but you can bet that eventually Mavericks will obsolete some apps which run fine under Mountain Lion. So an upgrade is not a front burner item, but likely one which will have to be made eventually. Apple provides the upgrade from the last version of Snow Leopard 10.6.8, Lion and Mountain Lion to Mavericks at no cost.

A poor value.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

The new Mac Pro.

Apple announced some of the pricing for the new Mac Pro (“nMP”) yesterday and it’s hard to see much of interest for still photographers whose application use is centered on Photoshop and Lightroom, for the high price asked.

The base spec 4-core 3.7gHz machine comes with 12gB of memory and two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs for $3,000. The 6-core comes with 16gB of RAM and one 6-core 3.5gHz CPU with two FireCore D500 GPUs for $4,000. Each comes with one 256gB SSD. You will need to add external drive enclosures to those as there are no internal slots for drives, meaning USB3 (cheap) or Thunderbolt (still very expensive).

Given the CPU-intensive nature of PS and LR, the provision of two excellent GPUs in the nMP is largely wasted.

Compared with the 2.66gHz 4-core current MacPro (“MP”) the nMP 4-core will be 39% faster and the 6 core will be 97% faster on CPU tasks. However, you can buy a mint 2009 MP 4-core ($700) and upgrade it to a 6-core 3.33gHz i7-980 ($275 net of old CPU resale) with USB3 ($50) and a 256gB SATA III SSD ($175) on an Apricot PCIe card ($50) and with a GTX660 GPU ($150 net) for $1,400. I set forth the details of the upgrades here. The CPU speed of this upgraded MP machine will be 35% greater than the 4-core nMP and 10% less than the 6-core nMP and you will have a lot of money left in your pocket. And that’s before adding external disk storage for the nMP.

That makes the nMP a very poor value for still photographers. Movie makers should be able to take advantage of the new, dual GPUs when used with the latest version of Final Cut Pro X, but those GPUs are of little use to still snappers.

The 2009 4-core will only fall in value, owing to age and because more will become available as nMP early adopters sell their old machines. Thus the next few quarters will represent an excellent opportunity for 4-core MP buyers who, as a side benefit, will be spared all the usual teething troubles of a new, untested design, and will not need to buy external enclosures and costly Thunderbolt cables if that option is elected.

Update January, 2014:

Performance data are now coming out for the New Mac Pro and, frankly, they are very disappointing for the money asked. The $3,000 4-core base machine records a 64-bit Geekbench score of just 14,200. Compare that to the stock 2009 old Mac Pros:

• 4-core – 9,100 (Used mint cost $750)
• 4-core with Core i7/980 upgraded CPU – 15,000 ($1050) – faster than the nMP at one third the cost
• 8-core – 12,000 ($1100)
• 12-core with W5660 upgraded CPU – 25,000 ($1400)

Nor is video performance much to get excited about. With the single exception of Final Cut ProX, version 10.1 (not 10.0) no apps currently out there appear to use all the cores of the high-core count nMP fully, and with the better specified nMPs running $4,000 (6-core), $5,500 (8-core) and an eye-popping $7,000 (12-core) that’s simply money poorly spent until applications start using the new technology fully. Don’t hold your breath for Adobe to get with the action any time soon when it comes to PS and LR.

Finally, I am sick and tired of the puerlie images comparing the sizes of the small nMP with the older MP’s case. That’s comparing apples and oranges. If the old MP is a truck, then the new MP is a passenger car needing a bolt-on trailer. The old MP has storage for up to 10*** (or more) drives inside (with PCIe cards and optical drive installations in addition to the stock slots) whereas the nMP accommodates but the one PCIe SSD. By the time you have the nMP in a like configuration, you will have boxes and cable clutter all over your work space. And there are still no proper thermal stress tests of the nMP running under full load, an area where the old MP is a known and robust performer.

In conclusion, a stock or modestly upgraded 2009 old MP remains a superb bargain which yields little in performance to the new machine. A state-of-the-art nVidia GTX680 GPU ‘Made for Mac’ card can be installed in a couple of minutes in the old Mac Pro for some $500, providing video performance comparable to the nMP, so the buyer of the upgraded 8-core/W5590 old Mac Pro is looking at a bill of $2,000 with the fast CPUs and the better GPU. No contest.

Old MP buyers will only be winners over the next few quarters as early upgraders flood the used market with the older machines, making for abundant supply and falling prices.

*** Old MP drive capacity:

• Four 2.5″/3.5″ in the backplane slots/trays. Up to 16TB total.
• Two 2.5″/3.5″ in the optical drive area. Up to 8TB total.
• Four 2.5″ in two dual Apricorn PCIe cards (cards are <$100 each). Up to 4TB total.
• One or two more in the PCIe area attached to the sockets on the PCIe cards. Up to 8TB total.
• Total? Up to 12 drives. Up to 36TB total.

Doubling data storage.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

Preparatory work:

In an earlier article I illustrated how to install an Apricorn PCIe card which accepted a SATA III 250GB SSD to hold the OS, apps and the Lightroom catalog. The two existing 120GB SSDs were striped using RAID 0, and became the backup for the new 250GB SSD. Drive speeds and capacities doubled after this enhancement.

SATA III Hard Disk Drive:

A like approach applies to installing a larger data hard disk drive. The Apricorn card has one additional SATA III socket, permitting attachment of a large HDD, which has to be powered separately. My two data HDDs, each 1TB in capacity, are filling up, being 70% full. Spinning disk drives write data first to the periphery of the disk platters, gradually filling up toward the spindle. As rotational velocity drops as the spindle area is approached, data retrieval progressively slows as the disk fills up. So, at 70% full, I reckoned that it was time to do the same with the HDDs as I did earlier with the SSDs.

Thus I bought a Western Digital Red ‘server class’ SATA III 2TB HDD to serve as the primary data repository, with the two SATA II 1TB WD drives striped into one backup drive using Disk Utility and thus enjoying a doubling in backup speed. For details how to convert drives to RAID 0, refer to the earlier article.

The premium for these allegedly more robust drives over the standard Green and Black versions is a few dollars. Mine cost $105 plus tax. The warranty is three years, by which time these will have halved in price. Are these really more robust than plain vanilla drives? I have seen no data to prove it, but for a few dollars extra I’m not losing sleep over the hype. The estimable Tom’s Hardware site finds the Red to be a middling I/O performer but outstandingly cool and quiet, with low power consumption. That’s a trade-off I will take any day.

Power and data for the HDD:

I had earlier installed a powered USB3 card, with power sourced from the optical disk drive area – click here for details. Thus, to power the new HDD all that was required was to split the power feed to the USB3 card using a Molex 1-to-2 Y cable, then a Molex to SATA power cable to energize the drive.

Cables – Molex splitter top, SATA power middle, SATA data bottom.

If you do not already have a powered USB3 card installed then power can be run directly from the spare unused connector in the optical drive area, the cable routed as I show in the USB3 article. The data connection is simply made with a SATA data cable connecting the spare port in the rear of the Apricorn SSD PCIe card with the data connector on the new HDD. The cable outlay is under $10.

Power use and supply limits:

Are the power supply limits of the PCIe slots being exceeded? No. The four slots can draw a maximum of 225 watts through the slots and an additional 2 x 37.5 watts from the two backplane connectors intended to power GPU cards. Here are the maximum PCIe power consumption data for my configuration:

• nVidia GTX660 graphics card – 140 watts (37.5 from the backplane board, 102.5 from the PCIe slot).
• Orico USB3 card – probably 10 watts
• Apricorn PCIe card with 250GB SSD – 4 watts
• WD Red 2TB HDD – 10 watts

So that’s a total power draw of 127 watts out of 225 watts available through the PCIe slots. That’s very conservative at 56% of capacity.

What is of greater concern is the use of top end GPU cards like the nVidia GTX780 and ATI/AMD HD 7950 and HD 7990.

• GTX780 – 250 watts – 75 from the backplane board, 175 from PCIe – OVERLOAD!
• HD 7950 – 200 watts – 75 from the backplane board, 125 from PCIe
• HD 7990 – 375 watts – 75 from the backplane board, 300 from PCIe – OVERLOAD!

Meaning that if you use one or two of these cards and drive them hard (why else buy them?), you must use an auxiliary power supply, which can be located in the DVD drive cage.

However, if you accept that a card of the calibre of the GTX660 is as much as you will ever need for still image processing (it is), then power consumption is not a concern.

Placement of the HDD:

The final issue is where to store the new HDD, as all my regular SATA II ports are taken. One option is to store the HDD in the optical drive area, but that area is poorly cooled and not the best choice.

I opted to attach the HDD to the top of the PCIe fan case using Velcro. In this location the power and data cables are easily connected and there is ample cooling. Velcro makes removal of the HDD easy. Rather than attach the Velcro directly to the HDD – heat and Velcro adhesive do not make for long term stability – I attached the HDD to the spare disk drive sled which became available when I replaced one of the 3.5″ HDDs with a 2.5″ SDD. I used the OWC sled to attach the SSD instead.

WD Red 2TB SATA III HDD installed in a stock Mac Pro drive sled.

Cables neatly arranged with cable covers and tied into a harness.

The stock HDD sled is a perfect fit between the processor cage and the existing HDDs in their regular locations. I used industrial grade Velcro whose adhesive and hook-and-look surfaces make for very strong bonds and made sure to clean the mounting surfaces with a swipe of isopropyl alcohol to remove dirt and grease before attaching the Velcro.

Velcro in place on top of the PCIe fan housing.

Take double care with those ghastly Molex connectors. It’s common for a pin or socket to come loose and recede as the two are mated, making for a bad connection. Ask me how I know. If you find you have two in-line Molex male-female connectors, as here, I advocate cutting them off and crimping the wires using a crimping tool and crimp connectors. Superior in every way.

The installation completed.

Thereafter it’s a simple issue of moving data over, using Carbon Copy Cloner, from the existing 1TB data HDD to the new 2TB drive, and then using Disk Utility to make the two original 1TB drives into one 2TB RAID 0 drive, setting the latter up as the backup drive in CCC and cloning all data back from the new 2TB HDD to the RAID 0 2 x 1TB pair of HDDs. As usual, I am careful to recreate the daily scheduled CCC back up task from Data HDD to Data HDD Bak, as use of UUIDs for these disk dictates that step.

The new SATAIII HDD is correctly reported by the SMART disk utility.

Additional storage:

Need yet more storage? You can convert to 4TB HDDs. All that’s called for is money. They run around $200. Further, Seagate just announced a new storage technology known as Shingled Magnetic Recording which allows yet more data to be crammed into existing platters, starting at 5TB. You can bet we will see 8 or even 10TB per drive before long. Astounding! Rumors of the spinning HDD’s death are greatly exaggerated and brilliant electronics engineers are doing some very innovative work here.

The bottom line is that the Mac Pro owner wishing to have a minimum of external clutter and cabling can easily run internal storage up to 20TB at present, and much more down the road. That should keep most users happy, unless they work for the NSA. If yet more is needed, use external USB3 cases loaded with as many HDDs as you need, but for my more modest storage needs having everything inside the Mac Pro’s case is perfection. A CrashPlan cloud backup covers for earthquakes and fires at the Mac Pro’s location.

Measurements:

I illustrate drive Read and Write speeds below for the original 1TB SATA II HDD, the new SATA III WD 2TB Red and the two original 1TB HDDs striped into one HDD (as seen by Finder) using RAID 0.

A) Original 1TB 7200rpm HDD running at SATA II speed:

Original 1TB 7200rpm HDD running at SATA II speed.

B) New 2TB WD Red 5400-7200 variable rpm running at SATA III speed:

2TB WD Red 7200 rpm running at SATA III speed.

c) Original paired 2 x 1TB SATA II HDDs striped as one 2TB HDD in RAID 0 (WD Green 7200rpm) – outstanding performance with speeds tripled:

Paired 2 x 1TB SATA II HDDs striped as one 2TB HDD in RAID 0.

I opted for larger 256K block sizes when striping the two older 1TB drives, as most of the activity is writing large photo files:

Here is Disk Utility after creating the new 2TB striped set:

Sound levels:

Addition of the WD 2TB Red drive makes no change to noise measured at ear level, two feet distant from the Mac Pro on the floor. This remains at 42-43dB – a low level susurrus of white noise.

Temperatures:

As you can see, the 2TB Western Digital Red SATAIII HDD runs very cool – it’s the orange trace, below. This temperature chart was run during the clone of the newly populated Red (‘WDRed2TB’) back to the newly created 2 x 1TB Raid 0 striped HDD pair (‘BackupHD’) – the pink trace. The Samsung 250GB PCIe SSD (‘Sammy’ – brown trace) runs warm, likely owing to its proximity to the Zotac nVidia GTX660 graphics card, which runs hot. The Northbridge chip – blue trace – runs warm by design, and remains 70F below its operating limit.

Spot the drives:

Green arrows designate drive locations.

The seventh is an SSD hidden in the optical drive cage, lower right.

Here is the drive topology and back-up design:

Drives in the Mac Pro’s case and in the Cloud.

All drives are inside the case.

Replacing trashed grommets:

The soft rubber grey grommets in the Mac Pro’s drive sleds both help retain the drive screws and confer a modest level of vibration damping. They rot and disintegrate with age. You can buy replacements here – the cost is for a pack of four:

Replacement rubber disk drive grommets. Click the image to go to the site.