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Quote: Dave Girard noted in his "Critical look at the new Mac Pro" that the machine has "a truly epic lack of expandability." I totally agree. As someone with
by acomjean 13y ago
Quote:
Dave Girard noted in his "Critical look at the new Mac Pro" that the machine has "a truly epic lack of expandability."
I totally agree.
As someone with a macpro1.1 I'm clearly looking elsewhere at this point. I take a lot of still photos and frankly I'm filling up 2 TB drives. Plus having a heavy bulky machine you can put a cable bike lock through makes it much less likely to be stolen..
The design is interesting though. I'm sure its crazy fast.
Just odd that you'll need an expansion chassis for more drive space.
Plus hdmi for external monitor support? Is every DVI monitor going to need an adapter?
- marcusestes 13y agoIsn't the idea with this model that storage moves all the way offboard via the bevy of new Thunderbolt ports? I'm using a fast Thunderbolt RAID drive on my iMac and for the first time, the cable isn't the bottleneck for file transfer.
- acomjean 13y agoI think external storage is the idea, but the extra cost and outlets and cords seem to diminish the desirability. In time they'll probably be cheaper.
- rdl 13y agoThey are already pretty cheap -- the Areca ARC-8050 8 bay bare is $1499. A decent 8 bay NAS like the synology ds-1813+ is $999.
- taspeotis 13y ago> They are already pretty cheap -- the Areca ARC-8050 8 bay bare is $1499. Are you having a giggle there, mate?
- Karunamon 13y agoTo be fair, if you're the person that the mac pro is aimed at and you can drop $3k on a machine, another 1.5 for a decent drive array isn't that outlandish.
- taspeotis 13y agoI'm assuming "bare" means without drives. The cheapest 2TB drive I'd be willing to buy is this one [1]. Disregarding the "NAS Drive!!!" marketing junk, if you sort disk drives by price on Newegg this is the first one with a 5 star rating from 31 reviews. You could go cheaper and get a 3 star rating'd drive for $85 [2]. To fill your chassis with the Seagate: 1x$1499 plus 8x$119 = $2451 To fill your chassis with the Toshiba: 1x$1499 plus 8x$85 = $2179 [1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178391 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178... [2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149407 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149...
- rdl 13y agoIt's not really marketing junk -- different drive firmware does make a difference in NAS and RAID applications. I'd probably be looking only at 4TB Ultrastars to fill the ARC-8050, or SSDs. I might go with something lower end for an 1813+ since you're probably not buying a gig-e connected NAS for performance. (it depends, though -- if you're doing just huge volumes of audio, you probably only care about reliability and sustained performance, and not much performance at that; and even flac doesn't use much disk space. it's video or other info which requires high-speed direct-attach drives in 20TB chunks.)
- kayoone 13y agoFunny everyone assumes that "Pros" dont care about money. I just see this as 1500 bucks i dont have to spend when getting a workstation from another vendor.
- rdl 13y agoYou rarely get 8 drive RAID6 in any workstation.
- kayoone 13y ago1500 you wouldnt have to pay if the Mac Pro had some form of support for internal drives. Its 1500 you have to spend because Apple sacrificed expandability for design, size and light weight in a workstation computer.. It really only makes any sense if you need to lug the thing around alot (in which case i would think a top of the line macbook pro would be the better choice), or you just dont care about the money.
- e40 13y agoThis is true. I wonder what the profit margin is on the new Mac Pro vs the old? Was there a $2999 version of the old? If there was, I wonder if they're basically pocketing the difference in cost, because they've conditioned us to spend $2999 on them. (I'm assuming the new Mac Pro is cheaper to produce than the old, but I could be wrong.)
- ctdonath 13y agoThe alternative is building a large machine containing vast empty space on the speculation that someone might fill it - leaving almost every unit significantly larger than necessary. TB2 is fast enough that putting the storage outside the box makes sense. Makes upgrades easy: plug it in, rather than having to tear the box apart.
- mikeash 13y agoI totally agree. The new Mac Pro is plenty expandable, the expansion just happens on the outside. I've had two Mac Pros so far. They're great, and I love the internal expansion... in theory. In practice, they never got any PCI cards beyond the graphics cards that came with them, and I used the hard drive bays more because I could than because I really needed it (e.g. keeping the old drive in the machine when upgrading storage and using it for secondary stuff). About the only problem will be GPU upgrades a few years down the line. TB2 is not quite fast enough to make that a good option. But most Mac Pro owners don't upgrade that, and it's plenty good for storage and other PCI cards.
- KaiserPro 13y agoOr you can have a z820 which has much more space, cheaper, and has a much better warranty and support(next day engineer on site, for free.) want two GPUs? sure. want 96 gigs or ram? go for it. want three fusion io cards? you betya.
- wonderzombie 13y agoOn the other hand, if you prefer OS X as I do, you are SOL. :)
- kayoone 13y ago> Makes upgrades easy: plug it in, rather than having to tear the box apart. In theory yes, in practice it comes with a hefty price tag. External thunderbolt disk arrays are quite expensive and something that would be unnecessary if the mac pro had some form of support for internal drives.
- twoodfin 13y agoPlus hdmi for external monitor support? Is every DVI monitor going to need an adapter? No: Thunderbolt 2, like Thunderbolt, has DisplayPort built in.