Need help on upgrading

Hello everyone, I would like to upgrade my Catalyst for an upcoming tour to make sure it will handle what I am going to throw at it. I am going to be running 6-8 SD clips a few times and I want to make sure it doesnt stutter. Heres my current set up....

Mac Pro 2.66 Dual-Core Xeon
8 Gig of Ram
ATI Radeon 1900 512 VRAM
I have 3 Hard Drives in it, 1 for the OS, and 2 of them set up in a RAID for the media library.

I was thinking about buying a SSD for the playback media, dropping the RAID, and using another drive to have the OS and content library. This way once I decide what I am going to use for content I can play it back from the SSD. Am i on the right path here or am i on crack? Also, is my video card up to par?

Thanks for any help and suggestions in advance. I really appreciate this. Want to get things handled before we get into pre pro.

if you are talkin 1080p then I would buy 2 ssd drives if your really going to do 8 layers.... even at 720 I would absolutely suggest this. Als make sure you carry a spare even if you cant have it in the machine. Spare OS drive with a backup of the show is also a good idea.

Hi Matt

the X1900 used to be the standard card for those machines, so should be ok.

As you said, ditch the raid and put an SSD in there with another SATA drive for content archiving. Running SD clips rendered using the AIC codec should be fine. But test everything!!

regards

Nev.

One other arrangement that is more $$$ but gives u more redundancy is to put 2 large normal sata disks in the machine with OS and content archive on them to have redundancy and then 2 SSD drives for redundancy. Once your show is programmed you can have it on both OS drives and point the catalyst software on each OS drive to a different SSD. Both would have the same content but this would offer about as much redundancy as you can get without having a second machine. If one OS or content drive bites it etc just reboot and bounce over to the other and go merrily on your way. Food for thought.... I guess I am paranoid :)

Just add an SSD.

Or Better yet, trade in your Mac Pro and get a new Mac Mini with an SSD.

If you are only running a few clips you don't need to haul around a big server.

I have Mac Mini Servers which run 3 layers of HD simultaneously on a single output and the whole system fits in a 2U rack chassis that I've custom built.

Hello everyone. I have done the upgrade. I bought an 80 gig SSD and all is great. I have the OS on one of my old SATA drives, all my playback content on the SSD, and a backup of the playback content on another SATA drive. All has been great so far and I was very surprised by the boost in performance. Thanks again for all the help.

Matt! The SSD are the way to go!
The Mac Pros that I have are SSD on the system volume and the content volume! No moving parts!
How ya been? Read about your mp3 spot calls! Slick!

Robb Jibson

Well Robb,

We certainly hope the fans in your computers move. If those parts start moving you're in for trouble.:p

haha yeah those still move. but way less prone to failure!