Improved Post Processing Tools
December 28, 2009 11:06 PM Filed in: Gadget
For Christmas I got some new post processing tools. The main addition is a Mac Pro that has really been a pleasure to use. The applications are really, really fast and the internal SATA drives as well as the external eSATA drives are about ten times faster than the Drobo FW800 I was using previously (the Drobo seems to have about half the throughput of other FW800 drives). Other additions to the post processing tools include adding Nik Software Complete Collection and upgrading to Final Cut Studio 3. Go to my Post Processing page to see the complete current list. I have the Mac Pro configured as follows:
- Quad-core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor, 2.66 GHz—I spent the money on the RAM rather than the clock speed
- 16 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM—this really makes the apps snappy
- 160GB Intel X25-M Solid State boot drive (internal)—boot up is fast but, more importantly, apps start fast and the boot drive stays separate from the RAID-configured Data drives. I keep a clone of the boot drive as back-up
- Four 2TB 3Gb/s internal drives in RAID 0+1 configuration—I get 4TB of usable space, striped for speed, mirrored for reliability
- Two NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 each with 512MB memory—each of the 30-inch monitors is connected to one of these
- 4-port eSATA card for connecting external backup drives—right now this is to connect the eSATA back-up drive, but could also be used for storage when I exceed the 4TB space I have now. Not all cards provide drivers that run in Snow Leopard 64-bit kernel
- Mac OSX Snow Leopard running in 64-bit mode
- Two 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays—I had one, and I got a second one
- Two UPS power supplies—one for the Mac Pro and one for the monitors and peripherals
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