Filed under: Hardware, Mac Pro
Mac Pros gain RAID storage option
Oh Apple, you sly devil, what with all the secretly upgrading hardware and not even telling us. Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Eric Wortman, we now also found that the Mac Pro gained a RAID card option for those who need mounds of storage and a secure, redundant system with which to manage it. The card supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and Enhanced JBOD. The card also features a 256MB cache and a 72 hour battery with which to protect that cache, and it occupies the top PCI Express card slot, connecting to all four internet drive bays.What's all this RAID connectivity going to cost you? A cool $999 on top of the price of your Mac Pro.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Fernando said 2:35PM on 8-08-2007
welcome to yesterday!
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-HD said 2:41PM on 8-08-2007
Fine for those very few who need that....hey Apple what about the rest of the Mac Pro? I am waiting with cash in hand, but not willing to buy the old stuff that you are offering. Time to bump up the spec's on the Pro!!!
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Mo said 2:47PM on 8-08-2007
Bump the specs?
You know NOBODY else sells that 3GHz quad-core Xeon, right?
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Ondra Soukup said 7:15PM on 8-08-2007
internet drive bay - like google ?
I spotted a typo...I deserve a candy ;)
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Shadowkahn said 4:01PM on 8-08-2007
Would be nice if they had a new add-in video card update - 1900XT is getting a little long in the tooth, especially for those of us who use boot camp to run Vista when we need a gaming fix.
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Jon said 3:00AM on 8-09-2007
#3: I am also holding off buying an 8-core Mac Pro. You see, the processor cores doubled but the memory speed stayed the same, thus each core now has half the amount of memory bandwidth it had before. This means that in some situations the 8-core is actually slower than the quad.
With a memory speed bump that thing will fly, but until then I'm not going to buy one.
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bebop said 11:03AM on 8-09-2007
"You know NOBODY else sells that 3GHz quad-core Xeon, right?"
What does that have to do with anything? The 3GHz just came out, so he's talking about the other 2 models.
I want to buy the mid-level one, which is currently at 2.66ghz, but I'm not going to until they bump up the specs; paying $2500 for a machine with an old crappy video card (the $1500 iMac has a much better one) and only a 250gb HD is of no interest to me.
It's been like a year since that model has changed, that is far too long. Before when you had nothing to compare Macs with, other than other Macs, Apple could get away with such a schedule, but now that the hardware is the same as PCs they need to constantly upgrade the parts.
If I spend a lot of money on a Mac Pro, I wanted the latest and greatest for that price point.
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JeffDM said 3:57PM on 8-08-2007
Mo, the CPU isn't the problem. All the offered graphics boards have been superseded in their respective model lines, and the cost of the memory, CPUs and drives have all gone down as well. Save for the Octo update (which is only relevant if you want to spend $4k USD), everything about the Mac Pro is now a year old.
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brian said 5:01PM on 8-08-2007
+1 for "rev the line already, Apple!" Other than the addition of the 8-way Mac, there have been NO improvements to the lineup, nor have there been any price drops in the whole (almost) year that they've been out! Also annoying is that this is the first time since the early days of the Beige G3 that there hasn't been an entry-level Pro model for under $2000--and most years saw the availability of a ~$1500 model.
The 2.66 is definitely the "sweet spot" in the price/performance curve: it's 31% faster than the $2200 2.0 GHz model and only costs 13% more, while the 3.0 GHz model reverses those numbers--about 13% faster and 32% more expensive than the 2.66.
http://apple.newbox.org/pics/bang-for-the-buck.png
So the $2200 model is a very bad value but the $2500 model is a bit much for me. I'd love to have a 2.5 GHz Mac Pro for ~$2000, or I'd take a 2 GHz model for ~$1500.
I'm waiting for 10.5 anyway--hopefully Apple will revise the lineup by October. If I get one, it'll be a workstation/server and Time Machine will make my life a lot easier.
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RS said 9:37PM on 8-08-2007
"and it occupies the top PCI Express card slot, connecting to all four internet drive bays."
Shouldn't that be "all four internal drive bays"?
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jbaldwin said 10:29AM on 8-09-2007
I hope they meant 1+0 and not 0+1 because the latter means in case of a single disk failure, you're at a higher risk of completely losing your data. I still don't understand why anyone would use 0+1... ever.
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-HD said 11:35AM on 8-09-2007
bebop's last point is the key here!!! "If I spend a lot of money on a Mac Pro, I wanted the latest and greatest for that price point."
Thank you bebop...
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