Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/09/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]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