?1 TB max until Tiger released a 2 TB SSD a few weeks ago and still pathetically small—do you know how much storage raw 4K video uses per minute?
Yes, I do. I edit 4K with FCP X on a loaded MBPr, and I have a 6GB RAID 0 Thunderbolt drive for storage. Thunderbolt has obviated the need for internal storage. Weep not for your cheese grater Mac Pro.
I guess you mean 6 TB? RAID 0 is not what I'd call up to the redundancy backup standard either, but each to his/her own.
One of my current set-ups uses two z-pools on internal 6-Gbps SATA each of 4 x 4 TB for 24 TB of total storage allowing for 2 x 4 TB disk redundancy. How do I get eight disks in a MacPro—4 in the drive trays and 4 in the optical drive spaces using a PCie card and special power supply.
The cylinder Mac Pro is a kickass fast machine alright but for anyone with huge storage needs it is an ill-conceived form over function design; looks nice on a coffee table though.
One of my current set-ups uses two z-pools on internal 6-Gbps SATA each of 4 x 4 TB for 24 TB of total storage allowing for 2 x 4 TB disk redundancy. How do I get eight disks in a MacPro—4 in the drive trays and 4 in the optical drive spaces using a PCie card and special power supply.
The cylinder Mac Pro is a kickass fast machine alright but for anyone with huge storage needs it is an ill-conceived form over function design; looks nice on a coffee table though.
For mass storage, you'd use a mass storage device like:
This can reach 1GB/s speed. There are cheaper options. It has a few advantages over internal storage. You can swap out the drives more easily, you can share the storage with other computers and it makes it easier to upgrade the main hardware. You don't have to buy another machine, replicate the storage and then copy everything over, just unplug from one, plug into the other.
None of these legacy storage options will matter much once SSDs drop to a certain level in price. Samsung showed off a 16TB 2.5" SSD with 3D NAND:
If they hit $0.40/GB, it would cost $6400, which is about 2x the equivalent Pegasus. HDD solutions will be cheaper for a while but once they get to about $0.10/GB with SSD, being able to get all that storage in such a small space with all the benefits of an SSD (speed, latency, low noise, low power, no moving parts) HDDs just won't be worth investing in. Intel hinted at 10TB within a couple of years.
The Mac Pro was designed to be used for 10 years and the advances that will happen in that timeframe. If they'd put SATA HDD bays inside with all the cabling, they'd have to redesign it again without them when SSDs make them irrelevant.
Yes, I know the Pegasus2 R8 and it is nicely engineered piece of kit that I have used, but for $4000 extra to get 32 TB of storage, I'd have preferred Apple to design a different form-factor than a bloody cylinder to incorporate that storage internally. As your desktop shows, you end up with a beautiful black cylinder and a large shoebox full of external drives.
Yes, falling prices for big SSDs will help in the future and is obviously the way to go.
There's another slight worry too—the new MacBook has no TB and so-called pundits see TB going the way of FireWire.
It's hot and I am cranky knowing I will probably have to submit to the storage tyranny of the cylindrical MacPro someday.
Put in 4x 4TB and it will cost about $150x4 + $359 = $959 for 16TB or $1918 for 32TB with two of them. You'd only save $718 using bare drives internally and that's if you don't pay for extra RAID cards or power supplies.
External options give you unlimited expansion. If you run out of storage, just add another 16TB box. You can daisy chain these. You could have them sitting in a cooled cupboard somewhere and just run one TB cable out to whatever machine you want.
You can even use old Mac Pros as the storage box if you put a 10Gbps ethernet connection on. USB C will act as 10Gbps ethernet natively so you can just run that kind of cable to the storage.
I guess you mean 6 TB? RAID 0 is not what I'd call up to the redundancy backup standard either, but each to his/her own.
One of my current set-ups uses two z-pools on internal 6-Gbps SATA each of 4 x 4 TB for 24 TB of total storage allowing for 2 x 4 TB disk redundancy. How do I get eight disks in a MacPro—4 in the drive trays and 4 in the optical drive spaces using a PCie card and special power supply.
The cylinder Mac Pro is a kickass fast machine alright but for anyone with huge storage needs it is an ill-conceived form over function design; looks nice on a coffee table though.
Yeah, 6TB.
The RAID 0 drive isn't a "backup." It's a working volume.
I simply don't understand the worshipping of the old 4-drive bay Mac Pro "cheese grater" box. If you're a wedding videographer or similar small production house, I can see maybe thinking internal 4-bay storage is fine, but if you're working on large Pro projects (digital film, for example) where a data wrangler has uploaded RAW footage into a SAN disk array, and your Mac Pro workstation is but one of several nodes connected to this storage array. Maybe you're the editor (and someone else is doing compositing, or adding visual effects) and you're assembling a rough cut using various pieces of finished footage, dailies, and previz. Anyone with "huge storage needs" has got an in-house SAN (100TB-ish), and their Mac Pros are connected to it over FC. The small internal SSD in the Mac Pro will hold pre-rendered transitions and compositing effects to make previews in Final Cut play smoothly. The Mac Pro's internal storage isn't used to archive all the raw footage: even with 4-bays, it simply isn't large enough.
Comments
?1 TB max until Tiger released a 2 TB SSD a few weeks ago and still pathetically small—do you know how much storage raw 4K video uses per minute?
Yes, I do. I edit 4K with FCP X on a loaded MBPr, and I have a 6GB RAID 0 Thunderbolt drive for storage. Thunderbolt has obviated the need for internal storage. Weep not for your cheese grater Mac Pro.
Hmm—A 6 GB RAID 0 will store a few seconds.
I guess you mean 6 TB? RAID 0 is not what I'd call up to the redundancy backup standard either, but each to his/her own.
One of my current set-ups uses two z-pools on internal 6-Gbps SATA each of 4 x 4 TB for 24 TB of total storage allowing for 2 x 4 TB disk redundancy. How do I get eight disks in a MacPro—4 in the drive trays and 4 in the optical drive spaces using a PCie card and special power supply.
The cylinder Mac Pro is a kickass fast machine alright but for anyone with huge storage needs it is an ill-conceived form over function design; looks nice on a coffee table though.
For mass storage, you'd use a mass storage device like:
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/HE155VC/B/promise-pegasus2-r8-32tb-8-by-4tb-thunderbolt-2-raid-system
This can reach 1GB/s speed. There are cheaper options. It has a few advantages over internal storage. You can swap out the drives more easily, you can share the storage with other computers and it makes it easier to upgrade the main hardware. You don't have to buy another machine, replicate the storage and then copy everything over, just unplug from one, plug into the other.
None of these legacy storage options will matter much once SSDs drop to a certain level in price. Samsung showed off a 16TB 2.5" SSD with 3D NAND:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/
If they hit $0.40/GB, it would cost $6400, which is about 2x the equivalent Pegasus. HDD solutions will be cheaper for a while but once they get to about $0.10/GB with SSD, being able to get all that storage in such a small space with all the benefits of an SSD (speed, latency, low noise, low power, no moving parts) HDDs just won't be worth investing in. Intel hinted at 10TB within a couple of years.
The Mac Pro was designed to be used for 10 years and the advances that will happen in that timeframe. If they'd put SATA HDD bays inside with all the cabling, they'd have to redesign it again without them when SSDs make them irrelevant.
Yes, I know the Pegasus2 R8 and it is nicely engineered piece of kit that I have used, but for $4000 extra to get 32 TB of storage, I'd have preferred Apple to design a different form-factor than a bloody cylinder to incorporate that storage internally. As your desktop shows, you end up with a beautiful black cylinder and a large shoebox full of external drives.
Yes, falling prices for big SSDs will help in the future and is obviously the way to go.
There's another slight worry too—the new MacBook has no TB and so-called pundits see TB going the way of FireWire.
It's hot and I am cranky knowing I will probably have to submit to the storage tyranny of the cylindrical MacPro someday.
No MacBook ever had FireWire 800, either; that’s not what the MacBook is designed to be.
And the fact that Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C, we should see TB on the next one.
There are cheaper options, here's a TB2 enclosure that you can put your own drives in:
http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Thunder2-Quad-enclosure-Thunderbolt/dp/B00LMON6Z4
Put in 4x 4TB and it will cost about $150x4 + $359 = $959 for 16TB or $1918 for 32TB with two of them. You'd only save $718 using bare drives internally and that's if you don't pay for extra RAID cards or power supplies.
External options give you unlimited expansion. If you run out of storage, just add another 16TB box. You can daisy chain these. You could have them sitting in a cooled cupboard somewhere and just run one TB cable out to whatever machine you want.
You can even use old Mac Pros as the storage box if you put a 10Gbps ethernet connection on. USB C will act as 10Gbps ethernet natively so you can just run that kind of cable to the storage.
Hmm—A 6 GB RAID 0 will store a few seconds.
I guess you mean 6 TB? RAID 0 is not what I'd call up to the redundancy backup standard either, but each to his/her own.
One of my current set-ups uses two z-pools on internal 6-Gbps SATA each of 4 x 4 TB for 24 TB of total storage allowing for 2 x 4 TB disk redundancy. How do I get eight disks in a MacPro—4 in the drive trays and 4 in the optical drive spaces using a PCie card and special power supply.
The cylinder Mac Pro is a kickass fast machine alright but for anyone with huge storage needs it is an ill-conceived form over function design; looks nice on a coffee table though.
Yeah, 6TB.
The RAID 0 drive isn't a "backup." It's a working volume.
I simply don't understand the worshipping of the old 4-drive bay Mac Pro "cheese grater" box. If you're a wedding videographer or similar small production house, I can see maybe thinking internal 4-bay storage is fine, but if you're working on large Pro projects (digital film, for example) where a data wrangler has uploaded RAW footage into a SAN disk array, and your Mac Pro workstation is but one of several nodes connected to this storage array. Maybe you're the editor (and someone else is doing compositing, or adding visual effects) and you're assembling a rough cut using various pieces of finished footage, dailies, and previz. Anyone with "huge storage needs" has got an in-house SAN (100TB-ish), and their Mac Pros are connected to it over FC. The small internal SSD in the Mac Pro will hold pre-rendered transitions and compositing effects to make previews in Final Cut play smoothly. The Mac Pro's internal storage isn't used to archive all the raw footage: even with 4-bays, it simply isn't large enough.