The Need for Speed...
Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 8:28AM Well by now you probably have a good feel for the the general consensus around Snow Leopard. Pretty rock solid release with some unfortunate incompatibilities with some software, although these are falling off pretty rapidly. The other big win for most people is speed with nearly all of the reports I've seen (via Twitter at least) experiencing a much snappier performance from their Mac.
I've now upgraded my main production Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro.
Both seem snappier and I've had relatively few problems. I did have some early problems with the Mac Pro following a kernel panic after the install after which the machine came back up with Snow Leopard installed but was a bit "flakey". A couple of apps kept crashing on me. A re-install of Snow Leopard seems to have fixed that.
Now the Mac Pro is one of the pre-Nahalem Mac Pros with 16GB RAM, so it's no slouch.
However, I noticed a tweet from my good buddy Victor Cajiao (@victorcajiao) from the Typical Mac user podcast who was rebuilding his Mac Pro with a new 10,000RPM system disk.
Hmm....
The drive Victor had chosen was the Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB - a bit of a speed monster. It transpires that he's been running his Mac Pro with another 10,000 RPM drive and loves it.
One of the main bottlenecks in modern machines is the speed of I/O from the hard disk. This impacts everything from Boot times, to application loading, to swap file performance and may other aspects of the perceived and actual performance of the machine. I'd never thought to upgrade the system disk in this way though - d'oh!
A quick google showed I could get the exact same disk from eBuyer over here is the UK for £160 plus VAT - ouch! Baring in mind, this is only a 300GB drive and you can pick up a 1TB drive for less than £50 but the price premium is for the speed, the quietness/coolness and build quality. Plus it comes with a 5 year warranty.
The 300GB is no big deal as it will only be used as the system drive for the OS and applications - plenty of room! All my data is stored either in the cloud via DropBox or on a RAID 0 array on the same machine (3 x 1TB) backed up of course by my Drobo.
OK, so I went for it!
I really need to do a clean install on the Mac Pro (actually, I probably don't) to clear off some of the older applications and have a pristine installation of Final Cut Studio. So when the new disk arrives, I'll remove the existing system drive and keep it safe, and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard and re-install my critical apps.
So that should see a significant boost on the performance of the Mac Pro!
Which leads me to the MacBook Pro.....
....but that's a different story for next time!
To follow my continuing saga about optimising my Macs to get the maximum speed possible, checkout the next related blog post Need for Speed (Part 2)...
Reader Comments (7)
Don,
I'm considering replacing my old 2.5 GHz dual PowerMac G5 with a new MacPro. I agree with your view of importance for fast disk access. I was considering getting an Apple RAID card with 4 1 TB drives Samsung F1/F2 or Western Digital (WD) RE3 and running each pair as a 2 TB Raid 0 drive. The first Raid 0 pair would be System drive and the second Raid 0 pair would be my Time Machine backup. I have considered Raid 0+1 or Raid 5, but I like the idea of both hardware and "human" backup (if I lose something important due to my mistake). What do you think?
I know that the Samsung F1 (HD103UJ) is rated for a RAID (maybe not the EcoGreen F2 - HD103SI) and the Western Digital RE3 (WD1002FBYS) is rated for RAID as well. Will the configuration be reliable enough?
cheers,
Paul
That's a similar configuration I used with my first Mac Pro. I'd be a bit wary of using a RAID 0 configuration for the system drive. The usual approach is to use RAID 1 (a mirrored pair) for the system drive. I did this initially but have since reconfigured and ended up with just a single drive as the system drive and striped the remaining disks as a single Raid 0 partition for speed
Do you not consider a Time Machine backup as a valid RAID 1 mirror? Are there hardware considerations where Time Machine backup will become corrupted once the main drive pair is corrupted? From the Apple docs and other posts:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15638.html
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1771551
http://blog.duncandavidson.com/2008/01/restoring-from-time-machine.html
I've also seen someone setup a RAID 10 configuration creating Mirrored drives using the RAID Utility and then stripping the mirrored drives using the software RAID in Disk Utility as RAID 0. You can lose one drive with no effect and you can lose 2 drives as long as they are not on the same mirror.
cheers,
Paul
Hi Paul, No, Time Machine is not a RAID1 backup. RAID1 is two identical drives where the data is written to each drive at the same time so they are identical. If one drive fails the other drive just carries on and no data is lost and the system remains operational. You then introduce a replacement drive and the rebuild the mirror.
I tried to create a RAID 10 setup on my Mac Pro and wasn't able to do it.
Thanks for all your input, Don. I appreciate your wisdom. I've given it some thought and I think I might try RAID 0+1 with the Apple RAID card. Slightly higher risk, but if you have a spare drive, you should be able to recover quickly. I've looked at the high speed SAS drives (very expensive for lower storage space). Access time for SAS drives is 1/2 that of normal SATA drives, but throughput 130-140 MB/s doesn't match a 2 SATA drive RAID 0 setup at 160-170 MB/s. I deal with just a few GByte size data files, so throughput is more important than access time and more than a Terabyte is required. We have a Time Capsule where I'll backup all my documents and source code to overcome "wetware" failures.
Your adventure with SSD is very impressive. I think the future is very nearly upon us. ;0)
cheers,
Paul
Hi, Don.
I am curious about the 10K RPM drive. How much more noise will that introduce to the system as opposed to the standard 5400 or 7200 RPM drives. If you give it a go, please let us know.
Cheers,
Shawn Hank
twitter: @shawnhank
facebook: facebook.com/shawnhank
Actually, none! I cant't hear it when installed but noticed when it was in my external FW enclosure it was actually quieter than the standard 7200RPM dirves