[X4U] Mac Pro fresh updates?

[Zane H. Healy]

At 7:00 PM -0700 6/16/10, zapcat wrote:
>On Jun 16, 2010, at 4:41 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
>>I'll agree on the YMMV, and I think your advice to the OP to stick 
>>with what he has, or look for a refurbed Mac Mini is a good one.
>>If the Mac Mini had eSATA ports or better yet Multilane port, I'd 
>>be more tempted by it.  It is very close to what I need, but lacks 
>>the I/O and RAM.  Even the iMac is very close to what I need.  The 
>>screen on the 21.5" is lower than what I consider acceptable, and 
>>if I were to go with the 27", I'd want to max it out at 16GB (I 
>>currently have 7GB and it isn't enough).
>
>*very* interesting comments, all, Zane...btw, what are the specifics 
>of the I/O limitations of the Mini?  Simply that the capacity and 
>speed are much less than that of the pro models?
>
>I suspect if those were not kept crippled, that many more folks 
>would go Mini...

The I/O limitations are centered around the fact you have a single 
hard drive in any Mac other than the Mac Pro.  This issue is made 
even worse by using 5400RPM laptop drives.  Actually this brings up 
an interesting question, how different is the I/O performance on the 
5400RPM laptop drives vs. a 7200RPM 3.5" desktop drive?

A further issue on the Mac Mini (and I suspect any non-Mac Pro model) 
is that you only have one FW800 port, and some USB2.0 ports.

If you can find it, the March/April 2009 issue of "Photo Techniques" 
has a fascinating article on maximizing the performance of your Mac 
for Adobe Photoshop.  The author also has a website 
http://macperformanceguide.com/ that is well worth reading (in fact 
it's been about a year since I last looked, and I need to take a good 
look at the site).

Zane


-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com              | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |