Upgrade Time

After loading a couple gig's worth of video onto my Mac, my hard drive has outlived its usefulness. And I want to keep the footage from at least 2 or 3 so I can have it all available to choose from when I put together a short segment for our web site. So the drive is at the point where doing relatively simple tasks cause minutes upon minutes of churning and grinding before an app or two will become responsive again. I've also had core envy since Greg got his 8–core after my 4–core. Well no more. I just ordered a new 8–core Mac Pro, which is sorta a 16–core because of the Hyper–Threading in the Nehalem. Gesundheit.

I went with 8G of RAM, doubling what I currently run, and went for a terabyte drive. My terabyte external backup drive still has plenty of room to hold 2 sets of backups from the 3 computers I keep backed up, so no worries there yet. I was really thinking of getting it with 2 drives and running them as a level 0 RAID (both act as one drive for faster i/o). But the damn hardware RAID card is $700 bucks, and I don't know if running a software RAID will end up being any faster because of the extra bandwidth it would use on the CPUs and that whole pipeline. If anyone has seen benchmarks of a Mac Pro running a software level 0 RAID showing marked improvements in disk i/o, lemme know. I can always add a 2nd drive later.

I also got Logic Express, just so I have the extra flexibility and power over Garage Band when we record the band.