[Leica] OT: Macintosh with afterburners

[rsphotoimages at comcast.net (Bob Shaw)]

Brian:

Expect a visit from Homeland Security presently....

But seriously, folks...I am Cyan (deep green) with envy.  Me little 
eMac is stuffed full of apps plus more than 2,400 images in iPhoto, 
averaging betwee 1.5 and 3+ Mb perimage, many duped in Photoshop 
Elements.  It runs, but it runs slow-w-w-w--w.

Man, I'd love to see your new baby baby cook!

Congratulations.


Bob


On Sep 6, 2007, at 21:40, Christopher Williams wrote:

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

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