but even that simple example is not the same setup. The Current Mac Pro can't hold two high-end GPUs and have 4 drives in hardware RAID along with a PCIe SSD boot drive and an AV card and have 3 slots free in the Magma chassis.
The Pegasus RAID box can sit anywhere, the Magma chassis probably won't be needed unless someone really can't find a Thunderbolt replacement for their PCI card. Peripherals like fibre channel adaptors or the Blackmagic adaptors are pretty small and if they aren't used daily, can be unplugged and sit in a drawer.
You're claiming that you can't do things that have been possible for virtually the entire time the mac pro has been on the market. Apple had their own raid card. Unfortunately it was a piece of garbage, (read the reviews, not just the rating) but they had it. I don't trust the Pegasus one. It mentions Raid 5 without ECC ram. Bit flipping is a big deal in something that uses parity, and flaky controllers can crash on a rebuild. You also have the issue that it's using standard firmware. It should have been rated for something like Raid 0,1, and 10 rather than anything that stripes parity. There have also been officially supported 2 gpu configurations from Apple at times. I think they used auxiliary power connectors, as the PCI bus wouldn't be able to take all of that. You also left out that the Magma chassis may not be sufficient to power the number of cards it will fit or that you are dependent upon the cards being stable in such a chassis. Magma doesn't provide drivers. The Magma to me is aligned with a mobile solution, like if you absolutely require certain hardware attached to your notebook. Backporting that at $800 to a desktop solution is really ridiculous, and I don't think Apple is counting on people doing that. In terms of raid on a chip type solutions, Areca has a couple that work with the mac pro. The low rating is mostly due to the 1 star complaint with newegg.
Quote:
Maybe 3rd parties will come out with matching peripherals but Thunderbolt peripherals are used by more than just the Mac Pro.
I've stated since thunderbolt came out that it would be far more logical to have a fully tested external solution rather than order two things and test them out. It's likely to be more expensive than the older solutions either way, but I tend to prioritize stability. This stuff comes up at times.
You're claiming that you can't do things that have been possible for virtually the entire time the mac pro has been on the market. Apple had their own raid card.
What I was saying is you couldn't have all the things together - dual high-end GPUs, RAID card, PCIe SSD and have 3 slots free on top. You couldn't even use an expander box in that case because you'd have used all the slots.
Ok, but how is it worse than Apple's RAID card, which you said yourself had very poor reviews? At the end of the day, hardware is built for a purpose and if it serves that purpose, there is no problem. You can look into the theory of how a $50 Monster HDMI cable should give you better quality than a $5 cable but if the $5 cable does the job, what's the difference?
People are using the Pegasus drives just fine. G-tech has some RAID drives too or you can get USB 3 RAID drives. If you need enterprise quality storage, you can buy some.
You also left out that the Magma chassis may not be sufficient to power the number of cards it will fit
250W, which is still better than the Mac Pro because the MP has 300W including the GPU. A 5870 would leave you with just over 100W of power. Now, you get at least 548W for GPUs and 250W for peripherals.
Backporting that at $800 to a desktop solution is really ridiculous
I think the price is high for an enclosure but it may come down, depending on how many people buy it. Apple priced the iPhone pretty high to begin with, as any company would, being cautious about how well it would sell. They have to cover costs. There are cheaper boxes if just a single card is needed.
What I was saying is you couldn't have all the things together - dual high-end GPUs, RAID card, PCIe SSD and have 3 slots free on top. You couldn't even use an expander box in that case because you'd have used all the slots.
I'm still not sure how well that would work. We may see more proof of concept pieces when the machine hits the market as we have with thunderbolt in general.
Quote:
Ok, but how is it worse than Apple's RAID card, which you said yourself had very poor reviews? At the end of the day, hardware is built for a purpose and if it serves that purpose, there is no problem. You can look into the theory of how a $50 Monster HDMI cable should give you better quality than a $5 cable but if the $5 cable does the job, what's the difference?
Huh? I don't follow on that one. The Areca card I linked wasn't terribly expensive. It wasn't a higher end version or anything. My thoughts on the Pegasus are that it relied on showing up early. It's not particularly well suited for Raid 5, but I don't think Raid 5 is really necessary for smaller storage solutions. My point about it was ECC ram and a quality controller are necessary for that, as well as correct drive timings. Otherwise you can run into real problems and have to clone from a backup volume rather than rebuild the raid in the event of drive failure. At that point you may as well use a Raid 0, as its hardware requirements are less stringent. You probably already know this (not being sarcastic, just not 100% sure), but Raid 5 has to read every bit on every drive in the case of disk failure. This means a flipped bit from months back can cause the entire thing to crash on a rebuild, thus the requirements there.
Quote:
People are using the Pegasus drives just fine. G-tech has some RAID drives too or you can get USB 3 RAID drives. If you need enterprise quality storage, you can buy some.
I've known a lot of people with G-Raids. In my opinion there are better things for the money. I wasn't really comparing to enterprise storage. That comment was just tangential to Raid 5 support.
Quote:
Not high-end GPUs. 5770s only have a TDP of 108W so you could have two of them but combined that's lower than a single FirePro W9000.
If Apple wanted to go that route in the old case, they would have to use auxiliary connectors. You could probably get a couple 150W cards in there. I know the theoretical limit on the PCI slots is 300W, but I wouldn't cut it that close without a secondary power connector.
Quote:
I think the price is high for an enclosure but it may come down, depending on how many people buy it. Apple priced the iPhone pretty high to begin with, as any company would, being cautious about how well it would sell. They have to cover costs. There are cheaper boxes if just a single card is needed.
I think part of the problem is that when it comes down to options, that will only make sense in a very limited number of cases. I don't anticipate huge numbers of external gpus to infiltrate the market to the point where they become cheap. In terms of storage, they're likely to use thunderbolt or usb3. If you're going beyond that to something that would have required something like SAS previously, you're looking at a different machine. That is still a sub-market of a sub-market, and I recognize that. I think usb3 will eat a lot of the residual usb/firewire/eSATA markets. eSATA even though it was just external SATA had its own issues. You had to deal with host card drivers. Thunderbolt could accommodate a lot of users populating SAS port multiplier boxes with SATA drives. It wouldn't offer as much bandwidth, but it would cover a lot of them.
In case you're wondering, I do plan to migrate storage to thunderbolt at some point. It would be factored into the buying decision on one of these mac pros. I typically consider the cost of everything combined, and it does add up.
It's a cool looking design, but I do wonder about the practicality. First, why it draws air (and dust) from the bottom. Plenty of people put their towers on the ground, but this thing would just get clogged full of dust very quickly.
Seems to me they could have also use a liquid cooling system (you can buy PC cases with liquid cooling), these have existed for a long time, are more effective, and don't suck dust into your computer components.
The new Mac Pro is incredibly cool and unique, but seems pointless. Apart from graphics designers who need specific proprietary software that requires OSX, most people who need this kind of power will just build a custom workstation - dual Xeons, dual graphics cards, as much RAM and storage as you want, liquid cooling, etc..., and just run Linux... http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/linux-hollywood/44656 ;
[quote name="Mikeb85" url="/t/158060/new-mac-pros-radical-design-draws-admiration-criticism-via-photoshop/80#post_2351012"]Plenty of people put their towers on the ground...[/QUOTE]
The size of this thing makes it scream to be put on a desk.
[QUOTE]Seems to me they could have also use a liquid cooling system...[/QUOTE]
Have you forgotten the last generation of G5? 100% failure rate.
I agree, I'd definitely put it on a desk. Looks too cool to hide. But I can see quite a few people putting it on the ground.
I don't know where I would put it if I were the kind of person to have it under a desk. I guess I would just put it on a shelf, where I already have my current Mac Pro. It puts out so much heat that having it under the desk in the summer meant unwanted heat billowing from under the edge of the desk. I don't really have space for cylinder on the desk.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
but even that simple example is not the same setup. The Current Mac Pro can't hold two high-end GPUs and have 4 drives in hardware RAID along with a PCIe SSD boot drive and an AV card and have 3 slots free in the Magma chassis.
The Pegasus RAID box can sit anywhere, the Magma chassis probably won't be needed unless someone really can't find a Thunderbolt replacement for their PCI card. Peripherals like fibre channel adaptors or the Blackmagic adaptors are pretty small and if they aren't used daily, can be unplugged and sit in a drawer.
You're claiming that you can't do things that have been possible for virtually the entire time the mac pro has been on the market. Apple had their own raid card. Unfortunately it was a piece of garbage, (read the reviews, not just the rating) but they had it. I don't trust the Pegasus one. It mentions Raid 5 without ECC ram. Bit flipping is a big deal in something that uses parity, and flaky controllers can crash on a rebuild. You also have the issue that it's using standard firmware. It should have been rated for something like Raid 0,1, and 10 rather than anything that stripes parity. There have also been officially supported 2 gpu configurations from Apple at times. I think they used auxiliary power connectors, as the PCI bus wouldn't be able to take all of that. You also left out that the Magma chassis may not be sufficient to power the number of cards it will fit or that you are dependent upon the cards being stable in such a chassis. Magma doesn't provide drivers. The Magma to me is aligned with a mobile solution, like if you absolutely require certain hardware attached to your notebook. Backporting that at $800 to a desktop solution is really ridiculous, and I don't think Apple is counting on people doing that. In terms of raid on a chip type solutions, Areca has a couple that work with the mac pro. The low rating is mostly due to the 1 star complaint with newegg.
Quote:
Maybe 3rd parties will come out with matching peripherals but Thunderbolt peripherals are used by more than just the Mac Pro.
I've stated since thunderbolt came out that it would be far more logical to have a fully tested external solution rather than order two things and test them out. It's likely to be more expensive than the older solutions either way, but I tend to prioritize stability. This stuff comes up at times.
What I was saying is you couldn't have all the things together - dual high-end GPUs, RAID card, PCIe SSD and have 3 slots free on top. You couldn't even use an expander box in that case because you'd have used all the slots.
Ok, but how is it worse than Apple's RAID card, which you said yourself had very poor reviews? At the end of the day, hardware is built for a purpose and if it serves that purpose, there is no problem. You can look into the theory of how a $50 Monster HDMI cable should give you better quality than a $5 cable but if the $5 cable does the job, what's the difference?
People are using the Pegasus drives just fine. G-tech has some RAID drives too or you can get USB 3 RAID drives. If you need enterprise quality storage, you can buy some.
Not high-end GPUs. 5770s only have a TDP of 108W so you could have two of them but combined that's lower than a single FirePro W9000.
250W, which is still better than the Mac Pro because the MP has 300W including the GPU. A 5870 would leave you with just over 100W of power. Now, you get at least 548W for GPUs and 250W for peripherals.
I think the price is high for an enclosure but it may come down, depending on how many people buy it. Apple priced the iPhone pretty high to begin with, as any company would, being cautious about how well it would sell. They have to cover costs. There are cheaper boxes if just a single card is needed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
What I was saying is you couldn't have all the things together - dual high-end GPUs, RAID card, PCIe SSD and have 3 slots free on top. You couldn't even use an expander box in that case because you'd have used all the slots.
I'm still not sure how well that would work. We may see more proof of concept pieces when the machine hits the market as we have with thunderbolt in general.
Quote:
Ok, but how is it worse than Apple's RAID card, which you said yourself had very poor reviews? At the end of the day, hardware is built for a purpose and if it serves that purpose, there is no problem. You can look into the theory of how a $50 Monster HDMI cable should give you better quality than a $5 cable but if the $5 cable does the job, what's the difference?
Huh? I don't follow on that one. The Areca card I linked wasn't terribly expensive. It wasn't a higher end version or anything. My thoughts on the Pegasus are that it relied on showing up early. It's not particularly well suited for Raid 5, but I don't think Raid 5 is really necessary for smaller storage solutions. My point about it was ECC ram and a quality controller are necessary for that, as well as correct drive timings. Otherwise you can run into real problems and have to clone from a backup volume rather than rebuild the raid in the event of drive failure. At that point you may as well use a Raid 0, as its hardware requirements are less stringent. You probably already know this (not being sarcastic, just not 100% sure), but Raid 5 has to read every bit on every drive in the case of disk failure. This means a flipped bit from months back can cause the entire thing to crash on a rebuild, thus the requirements there.
Quote:
People are using the Pegasus drives just fine. G-tech has some RAID drives too or you can get USB 3 RAID drives. If you need enterprise quality storage, you can buy some.
I've known a lot of people with G-Raids. In my opinion there are better things for the money. I wasn't really comparing to enterprise storage. That comment was just tangential to Raid 5 support.
Quote:
Not high-end GPUs. 5770s only have a TDP of 108W so you could have two of them but combined that's lower than a single FirePro W9000.
If Apple wanted to go that route in the old case, they would have to use auxiliary connectors. You could probably get a couple 150W cards in there. I know the theoretical limit on the PCI slots is 300W, but I wouldn't cut it that close without a secondary power connector.
Quote:
I think the price is high for an enclosure but it may come down, depending on how many people buy it. Apple priced the iPhone pretty high to begin with, as any company would, being cautious about how well it would sell. They have to cover costs. There are cheaper boxes if just a single card is needed.
I think part of the problem is that when it comes down to options, that will only make sense in a very limited number of cases. I don't anticipate huge numbers of external gpus to infiltrate the market to the point where they become cheap. In terms of storage, they're likely to use thunderbolt or usb3. If you're going beyond that to something that would have required something like SAS previously, you're looking at a different machine. That is still a sub-market of a sub-market, and I recognize that. I think usb3 will eat a lot of the residual usb/firewire/eSATA markets. eSATA even though it was just external SATA had its own issues. You had to deal with host card drivers. Thunderbolt could accommodate a lot of users populating SAS port multiplier boxes with SATA drives. It wouldn't offer as much bandwidth, but it would cover a lot of them.
In case you're wondering, I do plan to migrate storage to thunderbolt at some point. It would be factored into the buying decision on one of these mac pros. I typically consider the cost of everything combined, and it does add up.
They also have eSATA RAID enclosures around the same price:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151095
That should just need a USB 3 to eSATA adaptor like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Support-Multiplier-Patent-Pending/dp/B005DCCMII
There are a few eSATA RAID boxes:
http://www.amazon.com/TowerRAID-eSATA-Performance-TR4MP-Silver/dp/B003X0BJAE
There's a pretty cheap 5-bay here:
http://www.amazon.com/Mobius-trade-5-Bay-FireWire-Enclosure/dp/B00CH94GMK
It's a cool looking design, but I do wonder about the practicality. First, why it draws air (and dust) from the bottom. Plenty of people put their towers on the ground, but this thing would just get clogged full of dust very quickly.
Seems to me they could have also use a liquid cooling system (you can buy PC cases with liquid cooling), these have existed for a long time, are more effective, and don't suck dust into your computer components.
The new Mac Pro is incredibly cool and unique, but seems pointless. Apart from graphics designers who need specific proprietary software that requires OSX, most people who need this kind of power will just build a custom workstation - dual Xeons, dual graphics cards, as much RAM and storage as you want, liquid cooling, etc..., and just run Linux... http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/linux-hollywood/44656 ;
The size of this thing makes it scream to be put on a desk.
[QUOTE]Seems to me they could have also use a liquid cooling system...[/QUOTE]
Have you forgotten the last generation of G5? 100% failure rate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
The size of this thing makes it scream to be put on a desk.
I agree, I'd definitely put it on a desk. Looks too cool to hide. But I can see quite a few people putting it on the ground.
I don't know where I would put it if I were the kind of person to have it under a desk. I guess I would just put it on a shelf, where I already have my current Mac Pro. It puts out so much heat that having it under the desk in the summer meant unwanted heat billowing from under the edge of the desk. I don't really have space for cylinder on the desk.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
... I don't really have space for cylinder on the desk.
You don't have enough space behind your monitor?
If its not a corner station, that pushes the monitor closer to the near edge, and takes space away from the physical desktop.