Machine / Hard Drive Question

My video department has a couple Apple Pro Quad-Core 2.66 GHz machines each configured with the following. I am being asked if they can be used to replace my old G5's with Scsi's. Can someone let me know if this will work and have better performance than my old G5's?

Apple Pro Quad-Core 2.66 GHz
8 GB Ram
ATi Radeon HD 4870 512 MB
640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3GB (Bay 1, computer drive)
two 2TB HDs (Bays 2&3) configured as RAID 0 (striping) for 4TB volume

These machines were purchased for Playback Pro but we are going another direction. Video department wants to know if this will work as an upgraded machine for Catalyst or if I should ditch the 2TB RAID drives and install one SSD drive.


Any feedback would be great!

SSD all the way. There is no comparison. I would recommend installing 2 per system for backup. SSD drives are not immune to failure though they are much less prone to some types of it. I recently had one die during programming... Backup saved me. I would also recommend a redundant drive for the OS. So 2 sata drives for os and 2 SSD drives for content.

Thats funny - I had an OCZ SSD die last week. It stopped the machine booting! It's always good to have a backup drive in the machine, whether it be SSD or SATA just in case!!

Nev.

I guess my question is if two HD 2TB 3.5" SATA 7200rpm (Bays 2&3) configured as RAID 0 (striping) for 4TB volume in these machines give me better performance than a older G5 with scsi?

I have both on our systems,... 2 500 Gb HDs as RAID 0, where leaves all the Cat original content and ArtBetas, VideoTraxx etc.... and a SSD drive for Custom content, or playing back more layers.
With the SSD, you can get easily 10 layers (sometimes more) of SD content and a couple layers of HD content.
On the 500Gb RAID, you can get tops 4 layers of SD content and 1 layer of HD content.
Of couse this is generalizing the system, but is just to give you an idea of the difference. Also those numbers are not real for evrething, and depend on the bitrate of the movie, codecs, alll that things we leave... That is just to give you and idea of the difference.

Nev... Funny is one way to put it I guess. Mine hung up during a file transfer and after reboot the partition table was gone and it could not be repartitioned. Apparently this is not uncommon. Apparently OCZ is good about taking care of these things.. find out next week. Do you use any intel ssd drives? or any others for that matter.... thinking of trying some others out.

I have tested a few brands, but OCZ seem to give the best bang for the buck!

ya thats why I went with them,, I was just wondering if you had a brand you had uses often that has NOT had any issues. My crash did happen during a transfer via FW80 and I have seen reports of some serious issues with FW800 causing similar failures on macs... makes me wonder.

Which model of OCZ you guys recommend ?

Rafal

We are using VERTEX 3.5 - So far so good.....

I just got a new 12-core for post and 3d work. I installed four 2TB drives with Apple Pro RAID card and used the Other World Computing Optical Bay Chassis to install two of the 200GB Mercury EXTREME Pro RE SSDs into it.

Currently I am trying them as singles but will eventually configure to RAID 0 as my primary scratch disk. If they perform well in my render box then I'll most likely start putting them into CAT machines.

I invite any feedback anyone else may have on alternative drives even though I like the OCZs. Of course I still have about a dozen of the Mtron drives which have been rock solid.