Questions: Those of us drooling over a new Mac Pro

Renaissance Man · Post by **Renaissance Man** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 5:42 pm

mhschmider,

mhschmieder wrote:
It seems there's also some confusion or concern over possible changing memory requirements -- either with the latest updates or with the expected updates when the new chipset gets released (Pynryn or something like that) -- probably around late spring or summer 2008.

I think what your talking about is already here with the early January 2008 model. see link
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/08/app ... nd-xserve/
The new processors are being used in the January 2008 model. The memory is 800Mhz rather than the last model's 667Mhz.

Christopher

jloeb · Post by **jloeb** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 6:39 pm

By the way, just a public service announcement for those that have mentioned using RAID 0 arrays either for recording or VIs: it does not help, and can only degrade performance to use RAID 0 for audio work.

Trust me on this one. Yes, i am familiar with all of the reasons that it "should" improve performance. With multitrack audio and VIs, it doesn't. On NorthernSounds and other forums, this topic has been researched, argued, hacked to death, references looked up, references discredited, experts consulted, hacked to death again, dug up again, empirically tested. For multitrack audio/VIs: Does. Not. Improve. Performance.

The reason, in short form, is that seek time of a drive comes into play every time a file is accessed. UNLIKE with video editing, where you're streaming data from a single large file and RAID 0 is useful, with mutitrack audio and VIs that stream from disk, you're always asking the drive to jump around and do many seek/load operations per second. For this same reason, the best possible hypothetical scenario would be to have a single dedicated drive per track or VI. Since most of us can't afford that arrangement, the best option is to use a fast drive for recording and split your VIs strategically among a few drives.

For multitrack audio, Digidesign itself says: do NOT use RAID 0.

jloeb · Post by **jloeb** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 6:44 pm

oh and before anyone says "but with RAID 0, you're spreading the seeks around to more drives!" - that's exactly the point. you're actually increasing the number of seeks necessary by further fragmenting the multiple target files over multiple drives. Seek is the bottleneck in digital audio operations. Splitting small files over more drives simply does not help with what we do. Leave it for the hi def digital video folks (assuming you're not a digital video folk yourself

).

WSVP · Post by **WSVP** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 7:48 pm

jloeb wrote:By the way, just a public service announcement for those that have mentioned using RAID 0 arrays either for recording or VIs: it does not help, and can only degrade performance to use RAID 0 for audio work.

Trust me on this one. Yes, i am familiar with all of the reasons that it "should" improve performance. With multitrack audio and VIs, it doesn't. On NorthernSounds and other forums, this topic has been researched, argued, hacked to death, references looked up, references discredited, experts consulted, hacked to death again, dug up again, empirically tested. For multitrack audio/VIs: Does. Not. Improve. Performance.

The reason, in short form, is that seek time of a drive comes into play every time a file is accessed. UNLIKE with video editing, where you're streaming data from a single large file and RAID 0 is useful, with mutitrack audio and VIs that stream from disk, you're always asking the drive to jump around and do many seek/load operations per second. For this same reason, the best possible hypothetical scenario would be to have a single dedicated drive per track or VI. Since most of us can't afford that arrangement, the best option is to use a fast drive for recording and split your VIs strategically among a few drives.

For multitrack audio, Digidesign itself says: do NOT use RAID 0.

When it comes to software based arrays I am inclined to agree. I know there are a lot of people who think they will get better performance by Striping Raid 0 in there new Mac Pro's. But this forces the processor to arbitrate the array. Thus the processor has a lot more load on it. My experience in the past was that software based arrays generally performed worse than single drives, even with video applications.

I am not sure however if this would be true with a good dedicated hardware controller based array. I do not currently have a way to test this but I would love to hear someone who has used a "HARDWARE" based array, chime in and give us their thoughts.

jloeb · Post by **jloeb** » Thu Feb 07, 2008 10:26 pm

I have never used a hardware array card, but my understanding is that the largest performance bottleneck arises from the combination of the seek time of the drive itself with the nature of the access tasks inherent to multitrack audio or multisample streaming, namely, many seeks and small data transfers per second. That being the case, it seems unlikely that offloading arbitration to a dedicated card would solve the problem for multitrack audio situations, which is probably why Digi advises against it. Caveat emptor, I have not done the experiment myself.

davedempsey · Post by **davedempsey** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 12:48 am

I use WD Raptors - 4 inside my Quad 2.66 - Tiger on one, Leopard on another and two as raid for the project. Samples are all stored on various drives hosted by this:
www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-5pm/

I've justed updated to 12 gig and installed Soundflower to allow for Logic to run as a VI host for DP MIDI via IAC. I'm still installing updates etc but so far testing shows it'll work like a charm. On my machine I expect I'll be able to bring it to it's knees before I run out of ram. DP6's VI efficiency is eagerly awaited!

The Firmtek box can be used as a raid array - 2 x 5 bay boxes per PCI card. With 4 x 5 bay boxes raided (ie 20 drives) you'd get sustained through-put of 700MB/s.

Renaissance Man · Post by **Renaissance Man** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 7:36 am

Thanks for the heads-up on RAID arrays. That puts to rest a whole area of questions.

But do I have nuts and bolts questions on drives, partitioning and overall program loading strategy.

I just received my Mac Pro 2.8, 8 core yesterday. 16Gb ram and two WD 500 GB HD's arrive today. I'm planning on loading DP 5 (and updating to 6 when it's released) on the primary drive (someone had said that the Mac OS and audio program have to be on the same partition of the same drive).
I'm also loading Logic Studio and eventually hope to be able to switch back and forth between Logic and DP, depending on which program the client wants to work on.
In addition to DP and Logic I'll be loading Ivory, Italian Grand, and Akoustik Pianos. I plan to load them on a single, separate drive, and use the second new WD 500GB HD strictly for audio files.

I read somewhere (I think in an SOS review of Ivory from a link at the Synthogy site) the reviewer loaded all their piano VI's (since only one would be used at a time) onto one drive. In his case a firewire drive.
I have a Glyph GT50 500GB quad interface that I can bring into play, but I'd rather keep it for external back up. I've used the firewire 400 interface for back up, but it's way too slow for audio. I'll be able to use the Firewire 800 interface with the new Mac, but is it fast enough? Is it even a good idea? I was thinking transportability of the VI's between computers as I'm keeping my MDD dual 1.25 Mac up and running as a back up machine.

Can I partition the primary Mac OS drive after the fact? Or do I have to reformat the drive, partition it and reload OS10.5? Should I even partition the primary Mac OS drive?

I'm planning on partitioning the audio files drive- probably into five- 100GB partitions. This has served me well (on a smaller scale) on my old system. Good idea?
Questions, questions... Can you tell I'm excited? I'm not a total newbe but want to do it right the first time. I'm looking to benifit from your experiences.
As always, Thank you.
Christopher

jloeb · Post by **jloeb** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 9:37 am

I can't see why you would want to patition unless you plan to use Windows. There's no other good reason i can think of for partitioning the drive.

Everything else looks good.

Renaissance Man · Post by **Renaissance Man** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 10:40 am

jloeb wrote:I can't see why you would want to patition unless you plan to use Windows. There's no other good reason i can think of for partitioning the drive.

Everything else looks good.

My plan is to have Leopard on Partition 1, Tiger on partition 2 (since Waves isn't yet up to speed with Leopard and Logic), and have two partitions for future use (to be used as Archive partitions for now)

Christopher

jloeb · Post by **jloeb** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:59 am

Sorry, missed that. Yup, that's a good reason.

Renaissance Man · Post by **Renaissance Man** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 8:40 pm

Well, it looked good on paper but hasn't panned out yet. The disk I have has Tiger 10.4.6 on it. No problem with my MDD Mac; just loaded it and updated it to 10.4.11 from Apples site. But when I attempt to load it onto the Intel machine it says the software won't work on that machine. I went to the Apple site and downloaded the 10.4.11 update but it wont load on the machine either. I thought 10.4.11 ran on Mac Pro Intel machines..
Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
Christopher

jloeb · Post by **jloeb** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:59 pm

Did you use the Combo updater?
See:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ ... intel.html

Renaissance Man · Post by **Renaissance Man** » Sat Feb 09, 2008 6:39 pm

jloeb,
I wasn't positive on which updates I attempted to load so I tried again using the link you provided. However, it still won't allow me to install it on any of my drives or partitions. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.
Christopher

jloeb · Post by **jloeb** » Sun Feb 10, 2008 1:42 am

ok so make it extremely clear for me what you're doing - you have a new 8core; you have installed and erased the primary drive using your 10.4 Tiger disk; then you partition your drive with the GUID partitioning option using Disk Utitlity? (Intel macs must have GUID format partitioning, not Apple format.) Then you download the Intel Combo update and attempt to update one of the partitions; right? And on the other you fresh install Leopard?

Renaissance Man · Post by **Renaissance Man** » Sun Feb 10, 2008 8:50 am

jloeb
Yes, the new 8 core; I reformatted (erased) and partitioned main hard drive into 4 partitions using Disc Utility (I used the default setting that comes up, can't confirm whether or not it's GUID. Is there any way to check after the fact?), then loaded Leopard 10.5.1 on partition #1.
After confirming everything is OK and functioning with Leopard, I inserted Tiger OS 10.4 disc. It checks the disc, reads the OS off of it but at the point where I chose the location where I want to put Tiger, all the drive partitions have a red X on them and a prompt pops up saying this software won't work on this machine or something to that effect.
I assume the Tiger disc is OK as it loaded and works fine on my G4 MDD machine.
Thanks for hangen' in there with me on this.
Christopher