Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/09/06

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Subject: [Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners
From: nathan at nathanfoto.com (Nathan Wajsman)
Date: Thu Sep 6 21:21:12 2007
References: <054CCD36E5E4E914849861F4@hindolveston.reid.org>

Brian, you have me drooling with envy!!!

Nathan

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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>
>

-- 
Nathan Wajsman
Almere, The Netherlands

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In reply to: Message from reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid) ([Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners)