Looking to supercharge your Mac Pro?
Apricorn’s Mac Array is a turnkey solution that is ideal for high performance applications such as video editing and image processing. The Mac Array internal SSD RAID Array takes your Mac Pro to the next level. Bridging the gap between your computer’s high capacity, slow hard drive and your system’s RAM, the Mac Array’s speedy SSD RAID takes over your computer’s processing (acting as virtual memory) for a performance increase of up to 10 times.
Built around four high performance solid state drives on Apricorn’s SATA PCIe Host Card, the Mac Array’s unique form factor uses only one internal full length PCIe X4 slot, keeping the other slots and drive bays free for expansion. Fully configurable, the Mac Array can be used singularly or for the ultimate boost – in tandem with a second or even third Mac Array for even greater performance.
The Mac Array comes pre-configured with the Mac BIOS and RAID 0 (striping) for maximum performance and takes just minutes to install. Simply remove your Mac Pro’s side panel, slide the Mac Array into an available PCIe X4 slot, replace the side panel and install the included driver. Your system will instantly recognize the newly installed drives – with the drives already formatted, you are now ready for business.
Perfect for high definition video rendering, Apricorn’s Mac Array has been shown to slash rendering times by 80% in real world tests.
When used to render a 3:20 minute music video with Final Cut Pro, the Mac Array cut rendering time from 18 minutes to less than 4 minutes. Converting the corresponding video to QuickTime was reduced from 20 minutes to just 3 minutes.
Great for Graphic Artists too. With image processing performance increases of up to 360% the Mac Array is also the ideal tool for fast image editing.
Real world tests using the MacArray as a scratch disk showed phenomenal results in image processing. Using Photoshop v.12 to open, rotate 180, adjust Auto Levels and save as a Photoshop document a 924MB TIFF photo the Mac Array showed performance increases of 360% over a traditional 7200RPM SATA hard drive. Rotation of the high resolution image decreased from 10:4 to just 3 minutes with the Mac Array. No more waiting on large files.
Increase your Mac Pro’s performance by 10 times with a single Mac Array or double up tandem style for a performance boost of over 18 times.
When tested with Disktester, the Mac Array increased read rates by 10x and write speeds by 6.8x over a traditional 7200RPM SATA hard drive. And when used in tandem with a second Mac Array, the speeds increased yet again to 18x read speed and 13.5x write speeds.
Apricorn’s Mac Array PCIe board with 4 MLC 128GB WD SSDs retails for US$1,499.
More info here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn W.” for the heads up.]
Not a great time to invest in spinning disk drives these days.
Drool.
Just doubled the memory in my Quad Core Mac Pro ( stock 3GB to 6 Gb ) earlier this week and conversion times with & without Turbo 264 HW dongle dropped considerably & were already pretty good. It cost $99.
As snappy as the SSD is, you can do even better by using a RAM disk.
I run this command in a terminal window:
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ “ramdisk” `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://1048576`”
..and then I drop whatever Xcode project I’m working on onto the RAM disk. My build times dropped from about thirty seconds using the SSD, to about four seconds using the RAM disk.
When I’m done for the day, I just copy my project directory back to the SSD.
-jcr
Ihis isn’t something you could or would want to use as your startup drive is it? I didn’t see any information regarding startup disk so I assume, no?
I wonder how this setup would compare to OWCs SSD RAID using DigiLloyd large test action.
http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#cat_outrageously_fast_systems
Apple killed the floppy and is now out to get the hard-drive. And these guys are helping. When does the carnage end? Jobs is a tech-world serial-killer!
Jobs is a tech-world serial-killer! With fans!
Half a TeraByte of storage for the price of an iMac or MacBook Pro? While I get the “need for speed” and can lust for such a bonus, it doesn’t seem to be such an economic choice. A couple more GB of standard RAM would help a bit at a much lower cost.
Yes. We ARE headed towards spinning-disk-free systems – like the MBA. The movement has obviously already begun. But … what percentage of systems sold are like that? Maybe 1% of all Macs? We will get there, and Apple is already leading the way, but it won’t be 2011 or 2012. And many desktops will trail the field, due to need vs cost.
Apple says that the minimum requirement for Logic Pro 9 is 2 GBs, however from personal experience, the minimum requirement is usually on the lower end of performing. Another thing to note is that Logic Pro runs entirely in your computers RAM,
http://www.articlesbase.com/supplements-and-vitamins-articles/leanspa-acai-review-how-effective-leanspa-acai-is-3618320.html
Everyone complains about price — but for absolute bleeding edge performance professionals will always have to pay more than mainstream consumers.
It wasn’t too long ago that a PowerMac G3 with 1GB RAM and a 100MB magneto-optical drive cost USD $10,000.
Mac BIOS?????
You mean EFI?