3TB HD, triple SSD iMac turnkey drive upgrades available from OWC

It's called a PC with windows 7. You can buy a much more powerful PC than a mac for less than 1/2. And it will render video more quickly as well. I have an i7 based PC at 4ghz which would cost a bundle if apple put it out, and it wouldn't run at 4ghz. It's faster than a $2500 mac pro and it cost $700, has 2TB of space too. Of course a mac users can't understand this because they have already been brainwashed. So they begin to come up with excuses... But whatever makes them happy. They can sit there happy as I render a video project in 1/2 the time they can on my PC that cost 1/2 as much. If only windows 7 crashed all the time and was miserable to use and unproductive as mac users claim, I'd get a mac. Until then no thanks.

Sweet! All they need is a kidney trade-in option and I'm sold.

If I needed that much storage and power I would just buy a MacPro. I feel it would put too many marbles in one place in an iMac. If the screen breaks, where are you on an iMac? On a MacPro you can just use any monitor you want and even video cards can be upgraded.

I saw the configuration site, TOO CONFUSING!!! I could never order from that page, though I have purchased several things from them before and would consider myself to be a mac enthusiast since 2003. They really need to simplify the configuration tool.

> "a 480GB SSD installed for a boot and applications drive, a second 480GB SSD for mirroring the first drive, and a 3TB drive for all of my data"

Assuming you run Time Machine, mirroring your boot and app drive is pretty much pointless. You can regenerate a boot and app drive without stress or agony; it's just inconvenient.

Your data drive, on the other hand, is presumably full of the things you've created. For most people, their own works and memories are considered irreplaceable. Your data drive is the drive to mirror *and* back up. In fact, consider off-site backup for your data, in case of home disaster.

PS. For "dream" performance, consider a single SSD for boot/apps, a pair of SSDs striped in RAID0 as a 960GB extreme performance workspace, and then the 3 TB drive as either a media storage drive (e.g., iTunes or Plex library), or as a bootable SuperDuper clone of your OS drive + a TimeMachine backup of the OS drive and data drive. Whatever you do, TimeMachine your OS and data—makes restoring or upgrading something the Mac handles itself while you watch TV.

What 3000 are you talking about? The site estimates those upgrades at way more, not to mention that does include the base iMac cost. Your talking way upwards of 6 grand to walk away with that configuration.

After some discussions with Stephen Foskett (http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/11/20/hybrid-hard-drive-ssd-alternative/), I bought a 2.5" Seagate 500gb/7200 rpm Hybrid drive for my older MacBook Pro. So far I've been very pleased with it. After it got 'tuned' to my disk usage, it does seem to be faster. But more importantly for a laptop, it runs -significantly cooler- (as measured by cooling fan speed) than the predecessor Seagate 500gb/7200 rpm.

And my Mini Server uses an OWC Qx2 (4x Hitachi 1tb drives). Once I replaced the Seagate 1tb drives with Hitachi drives, this has worked great. It's fast and unless I'm really pounding on it, it's quiet. I'm running RAID5, so I get 3tb effective from those 4 drives.

Still, a lot of our storage choices will be limited until Apple adopts eSATA (what I'd prefer personally), USB2, or some other much faster replacement for FW800.

YES!

...it sounds to me like there's a strong(er) desire out there for an in-between Mac desktop: More room for expansion than a Mac mini, more customizable than an iMac, less expansion than a MacPro Tower.

Something with the desktop footprint of a mini, just maybe taller? Like two or three minis stacked up? Sort of... cube-like?

#heresy