Category Archives: Photography

Mac Pro 2009 – Part XXVI

Mac Pro

Thunderbolt speeds for your storage.

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

Thunderbolt is Intel’s technology for faster data movement between the Mac and storage drives. It also permits connection of displays.

Much has been made of the speed of TB in Apple’s marketing and it’s a technology which will never become available for classic Mac Pros as the required chips reside on the backplane board (motherboard) and cannot be added on a PCIe card. Thunderbolt requires costly external disk drive enclosures to work with the new cylindrical Mac Pro, also very costly.

But there’s a very simple solution for classic Mac Pro users seeking near-TB speeds and it comes from Apricorn in the guise of a dual SSD PCIe card.


Click the image.

Retailing at $140-150, plus the cost of two identical SSDs of your choice, assembly takes 3 minutes and installation in any PCIe slot in the Mac Pro a minute more. There are no cables to attach. Two status LEDs on the card glow green when all is well. PCIe allows the SSDs to run at SATAIII speed, which is twice the speed of the internal, dated SATAII drive slots in the Mac Pro.

This particular card was fitted with two Crucial MX100 256GB SSDs for a total cost of under $400, and set up in Disk Utility as a striped pair, meaning that both drives are written to simultaneously with disparate data streams, thus doubling the speed compared with a single drive. The drive pair is seen as one drive in Finder and should be regularly backed up, such backup being to the cheapest spinning drive handy. The OS and applications are moved to the Apricorn and the following speed test data were obtained:

Data are for a modestly spec’d single CPU Mac Pro with an X3690 3.46GHz CPU running just 8GB of 1333MHz RAM.

This compares with 715 and 791 for the new Mac Pro 2013 with 64GB of 1600MHz RAM and the D700 dual GPUs.

Expect 50 MB/s for a spinning HDD in a regular drive slot, maybe 150 MB/s for a single SSD in an internal drive slot and 300 MB/s for two SSDs in internal drive slots in a striped array. External USB2 drives measure 30-50 MB/s, USB3 some 75 MB/s. Clearly the speed gains here are very significant.

Thus for a very modest investment, you get 93% of the Read and 88% of the Write speed of a very costly new Mac Pro.

The ideal use for such a fast drive is for the OS and applications, of course, but for photographers processing very large layered files with frequent read/write activity, it’s an excellent temporary storage drive. Once processing concludes, the files can be moved to inexpensive spinning disks for long term storage.

100mbs

Hardware

Broadband speed at last.

Many computer users think nothing of spending on the latest hardware yet fail to diagnose where their speed bottlenecks lie. For most who use the internet frequently the greatest bottleneck is broadband speed, or rather the lack of it.

I have been plagued with mediocre broadband as long as I can remember, with AT&T’s Uverse service here peaking at 22mbs and averaging more like 15mbs. It has at least been very reliable, here in the Bay Area.

When my son Winston was buying his iPhone 6 at the local Apple Store the other day (I manage his money so he can afford it!) I got chatting with the Apple sales person and he told me that a local broadband vendor named Astound services his (old – no optical fibre) building and that he was getting 100mbs. Well, I immediately discounted the possibility of such insane speed but followed his advice and checked for service in my area. Sure enough, they cover it so I had them install their hardware on the understanding that if they did not at least double my AT&T speed that they would have to refund me anything I paid. Done deal.

Here is the result of this happy experience:


On the 2014 MacBook Air, 5GHz, 802-11ac.


On the iPhone 6.

Wow! The Mac Pros in the home all report similar results, as do the many iPads.

I’ll parallel run with AT&T for a month and, if Astound is reliable, will have the unalloyed joy of firing one of America’s least ethical big businesses, one which treats its customers like crooks. The only crook in this relationship is the vendor.

Installation issues? The Astound service runs over cable, not over the dated copper wires used by AT&T, and comes with a small cable modem. My building was already wired for cable so installation was a breeze, no cables to run or walls to drill. I connected the router to my Apple Airport Extreme (AEX) dual band 802-11ac wireless router (the tower version) using an RJ45 Ethernet cable (the Astound technician’s was too short, so off it was to the cardboard box under the stairs) and one of the MacBook Airs immediately saw the connection amd recorded 99mbs download speed, accompanied by much whooping and hollering from this user. However, none of the other machines in the home wanted to ‘see’ the AEX. I let the man go with the assurance I could figure it out, and after the usual poncing about (with respect to Mr. Cook) determined a hard reset of the AEX was called for whereupon everything was sweetness and light and, before you could say sodomite, I had some dozen machines running well in the old manse.

If at all possible, look at cable broadband providers in your area before splashing out on yet newer computer hardware. A fast connection really is night and day, and the usefulness of my remaining ‘clock cycles’ has been vastly increased. Cost? No different from the soon-to-be-fired AT&T. Plus Astound told me they are working on a 250mbs version. Sign me up.