Weekend Project: Mac Pro Resurrection
January 16th, 2011
This weekend I stripped out all of the hard drives from my old Early 2006 Mac Pro and replaced the boot drive with an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD boot drive and a 3TB Raid 0 to use as a scratch disk for video. The resulting speed boost was excellent!
Performance (Read/Write) of the SSD Boot Drive:
Performance (Read/Write) of the 3TB Raid0:
As a matter of fact, after these improvements the Mac Pro now scores almost as high as my brand new 27″ Core i5 iMac on XBench tests!
Red: 2010 iMac, Blue: 2006 Mac Pro with SSD boot drive
Comments
Comment from Jeremy Johnstone - January 16, 2011 at 11:57 pm
What were the scores before the upgrade?
Comment from Graham Hancock - January 17, 2011 at 12:03 am
According to XBench Tests from August 2010:nn103.18 Readn104.66 Write
Comment from Ben - January 17, 2011 at 12:38 am
So the RAID0 is faster than the SSD? Is it striped across multiple disks?
Comment from Graham Hancock - January 17, 2011 at 1:10 am
Yep. Striped across 3 1TB WD Caviar Black drives