[Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners

[leicachris at worldnet.att.net (Christopher Williams)]

Congrats on the SuperRam.

I'm adding 4gb to my new iMac, but I do have to say LR opens already within 
seconds, can't wait to see what CS3 does with 4gb RAM.

Chris

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Reid" <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
To: <LUG@leica-users.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 8:40 PM
Subject: [Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners


> 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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