[Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

I'm going to have to start filtering your mail before it makes it to
my computers. Both of them are feeling seriously impaired and needing
of upgrades. RAID envy is a terrible thing! But the choice was a good
bike or a new computer and this year physical fitness won out over
computers. I think it'll be another year before I upgrade - I need an
order of magnitude increase in Photoshop performance before I jump.

Please keep us informed about how this configuration works. I notice
that OS X doesn't give back memory very well, even on my 4GB G5.

Adam

On 9/6/07, Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> 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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