[Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners

[ricc at mindspring.com (Ric Carter)]

drooling

ric


On Sep 6, 2007, at 10:40 PM, Brian Reid wrote:

> This is utterly off topic, but I'm the barkeep here and I don't  
> rant very often.
> I just finished some risky modifications to a brand-new computer  
> and I am utterly delighted. I suspect that what I have to say here  
> is of interest only to performance freaks and computer engineers.
>
> My daughter had a summer job working at Apple, and as a (part-time)  
> employee she was entitled to buy a small number of things at  
> significant discounts, and, further, she is explicitly allowed to  
> buy them for relatives. So I gave her some money to buy me a Mac  
> Pro with the maximum processor power that the law allows, one 500GB  
> disk, and enough memory to be bootable. Since I already had a  
> working computer, I felt free to dissect it and make changes.
>
> I found some certified Mac Pro memory for $100/GB in 2GB parts and  
> filled all 8 memory bays: 16GB of PC3500 RAM. The 2GB parts are  
> dropping in price because the 4GB parts are starting to ship (at  
> $600/GB; no thank you!).
>
> I also got my hands on the new Mac Pro RAID card, and 3x750GB/eSATA/ 
> 7200RPM disks. I built a 3-disk RAID 5 array out of it, and  
> benchmarked it to drool over how fast it is.
>
> So far this is just hardware diddling. Now came the scary part. I  
> put my home directory on the RAID. I didn't want to risk making the  
> whole system run on the RAID, so boot and system functions still  
> run on Disk0, which is standalone.
>
> The Unix sysadmin in me wanted just to make /Users/reid be a  
> symlink, but I have enough scars and wounds from Mac OS that I knew  
> it couldn't be that simple. A quick remedial reading of the Netinfo  
> Manager "documentation" gave me the courage to go muck with that;  
> changing the Netinfo resource for the home directory for user  
> "reid" from /Users/reid to /Volumes/HindolvestonRAID/reid" did the  
> trick. I put in the symlink, too, as an act that is partly  
> superstition and partly "can't hurt; might help".
>
> Shut down, restart, move all of my files to it with Retrospect,  
> restart again just for good measure, and log on.
>
> Zooooooooooom. I've never experienced anything like it. You  
> doubleclick a big klunky application like Dreamweaver or  
> Illustrator or InDesign and it comes up before you finish blinking.  
> The RAID card tickles all of the disks, so there's a lot of very  
> quiet disk noise for a fraction of a second while these  
> applications are launching. Safari launches in an unmeasurably  
> short interval. Photoshop launches in about 4.5 seconds and opens a  
> new image in about 0.1 second. Lightroom launches in 3 seconds.
>
> I think I can learn to live with this performance. I have to decide  
> whether I'm going to be totally anal and do Retrospect backups of  
> the RAID 5 to protect against fire and earthquake and other  
> catastrophes.
>
> Brian Reid
> giddy with power
>
>
>
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