MacPro Internal HDs

The new iMacs & Tbolt won't change the connundrum of fast SSD equaling higher price and less room.

I'm not sure why BenB needs access to 2 TB of data all the time, but maybe he does. Regardless, this thread raises the question of how fast a drive really has to be before it ceases to be the main performance bottleneck. I just happened to have started a thread on that subject a few days ago, and so far have received no answers:

fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/1527...ast-is-a-waste#15277

Anyway, another thing to consider:

Sata drives slow down SIGNIFICANTLY when they are more than 50% full, whereas SSD's do not. So, if you're looking at the cost / performance / capacity issue, you really need to compare a 512 MB SSD to a 1 TB Sata drive. When you do, the differences are not so bad.

Also consider that SSD's run quite a bit cooler, which saves air conditioning costs. - A small but still significant factor if you use a lot of drives. - And last, while SSD's are not foolproof, they are much more reliable than Sata drives.

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I have a Mac pro and will probably be getting an ATTO PCIe sas card, in order to have four 6G internal sata busses. Then I'll add four internal 6G SSD's.

- Or maybe I'll get one PCIe SSD array, and use it as my main source / scratch drive, but only if it turns out that 780 MB/s will actually save me time over a "mere" 560, which is not clear to me yet. (see that other thread.)

- Or maybe I'll take advantage of the cheap prices now on the old 3G SSD's, and just use the Mac's stock internal busses. This will still be a heckuvalot faster than a full black caviar Sata drive, for only about 2X the cost.

Someone forgot to tell my 4 internal 2TB SATA drives to slow down once they got over 50% full. No, they do not "significantly" slow down at that point. Old wives tale. Well, I take that back. It was true 10 years ago of drives, but not today. Drives are faster and much more robust today.

Why to I need to access 2TB of storage all the time? Because we are a professional post production, digital media shop and deal with that much data daily. I don't know any of my colleagues locally who could possibly live with less than a minimum of 2TB of storage on a workstation. In fact, it's 6TB of data on my workstation alone that need to be online. Stock media, various jobs in progress (video, audio, web, print, etc).

BenB wrote: Someone forgot to tell my 4 internal 2TB SATA drives to slow down once they got over 50% full. No, they do not "significantly" slow down at that point. Old wives tale. Well, I take that back. It was true 10 years ago of drives, but not today. Drives are faster and much more robust today. .

It's not an old wives tale, it's a physical limitation of how the drive heads work, plus simple physics of how fast different areas of the platter spin. It has nothing to do with robustness.

I suggest you do some actual testing before you post again on this subject. - Or you could take the word of guys like DigiLloyd et al, who do such tests pretty much once a year. Lloyd tested a 2 TB Black Caviar about a year ago, and the difference was huge. My own tests confirm this.

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I am interested to know, though, if you feel your current drives are not a bottleneck. I'm only using 7200 rpm Sata's right now, and they are absolutely maxing out with simple exporting of a 1-file render.

I'd also be VERY interested to know, if you ever do test & if you ever get an SSD, how that SSD drive compares to your Sata drives, with video.

Having about 30 years behind me as a professional IT engineer I have done and seen meany tests over many years.

I'll leave this thread to the rest of you to discuss. I've given the facts, they can be disputed as you wish, but I won't get into a pissing match over facts I know as a seasoned professional engineer.