Mac Pro ideal HD setup for Logic?

Hey guys - just want to ask suggestions for the ideal hard drive set up for using logic.
I have a dual quad 2.8 mac pro with 10gb of ram. External sound card is usally a line 6 ux1, but when im recording vocals or anything miked up it's
my focusrite saffire pro 40.
I have 4 internal drives:
1. boot up drive is 240gb SSD,
2. "tracking" drive,
3. "loops" drive,
4. personal data drive - pics, docs, movies, music, etc....
So i was told many years ago (when i had a imac) that the idea drive set up was to have a boot/apps drive, tracking drive, & loops drive.
I've done that but im not sure how to get logic to work like that. Even though my projects are all stored on the tracking drive,
the loops end up there too...
Is it ok like that or can someone suggest an alternative? Im using logic studio 8 btw
thanks in advance
Mal

I have a Mac Pro 2*2.26 system. I use Logic and iPhoto extensively with a 200 GB iTunes collection and a 80 GB iPhoto collection.
I use the default 640GB drive as my boot drive with applications. I use a second 1 Terrabyte drive as my "Home Directory" for documents (iPhoto library, iTunes library, Logic files, etc...). I use a third Terrabyte drive for my Time Machine backups. All are internal drives.
Given you have over a terrabyte of data files, it would seem logical to keep the boot drive for system files and applications. For your documents or "Home Directory" it would seem a 1.5 or 2 terrrabyte drive is in order, with a third 2 terrabyte drive for your Time Machine backups.
I don't think a RAID configuration would be of benefit to you if you are not finding performance issues with Final Cut Express.
Barr

Similar Messages

Ideal hardware setup for Aperture

Is there an ideal hardware setup for working with 18megapixel raw files in aperture? Of the three...graphics card, cpu and ram...which are the most important to processing the raw image.
I am running 10.6.3 on a macbookpro 2.2GHz core 2 duo, 4G ram and an Nvidia card with 128Mb of vram.
Overall it feels somewhat slow, about 10 seconds to load the full raw image on screen. Is that just to be expected? Any form of image adjustment usually switches to low res while adjustment is being made.
Thanks in advance.

A fast hard drive seems to be the most important thing now. The more I use Aperture, the more I appreciate the need for fast, fast hard drives! Open the activity monitor and monitor your disk activity. Monitor the IO - if you are constantly in the hundreds for the disk IO counters, you are IO bound (and more than likely it's your library database and preview thumbnails database).
For a laptop, the Seagate 500GB with the 4 GB of flash built in that it manages might be a good way to go. I just got one and haven't had a time to put it in my Mac Book Pro for testing. If it manages to put most of your library database in the 4 GB flash cache, you won't see near the performance issues as with a regular hard drive.
You could get a smaller SSD for your primary drive and to put the library on, then get one of the kits to remove the optical drive and put the hard drive in that bay. Reference your masters on the hard drive and that way you won't go broke buying a huge SSD. Gasp! I know, me recommending referenced files - I'm grudgingly coming around. Well, that and Aperture 3 has some pretty nice features for referenced files that are making me more willing to consider that kind of a setup, esp. when I look at the disk activity and constant fragmentation of the library and thumbnail database files. I'm seriously considering getting an SSD just for my library database and thumbnail databases and referencing the masters on my internal RAID.
Also others have recommended iDefrag and I can heartily recommend it as well if you stick with traditional hard drives. If nothing else, download the free version and run it - I'll bet that the two aperture databases for your library will easily be the most fragmented files on your hard drive, followed by the thumbnails themselves. SSD obviously doesn't have the latency issues of rotating disk so defrag isn't needed - indeed it would just shorten the life of your SSD with a bunch of unnecessary writes. If you do consider SSD, the only one I can recommend for the Mac is from Other World Computing/MacSales as it does internal garbage collection. Until Mac OS X supports TRIM, normal SSDs that don't do internal garbage collection will run fine for a while, then hit a performance wall that will make you want to go back to your hard drive
Anyway don't feel bad - until I started tweaking my hard drive setup, there wasn't a real speed difference between my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro - want to talk about a real downer!

Hi i have just purchased a mac pro. ive installed word for mac as i wanted to transfer word documents from a windows pc, which are ona usb stick. however i cannot open the usb stick. can anyone tell me what im doing wrong!

Hi, I've bought a mac pro and installed word for mac, as i wanted to transfer word documents to the new pc. I saved the documents ona usb stick but I cannot open the documents from the stick. What am i doing wrong?
thanks

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
First of all, check that you are looking for your USB drive in the correct place. To do it, first connect the USB drive. Then, open a Finder window (press the left icon of Dock) and choose your USB drive on the Finder sidebar, under "Devices". Finally, just copy the documents you need to the internal disk.
If you want to show the USB drive in Desktop, open Finder menu (on the menu bar) > Preferences > General, and tick "External drives"

Ideal drives setup for running Logic???

Hello,
I just purchased an internal 256GB Samsung 840 pro SSD drive. I have an external Firewire 800 2 TB external hard drive (7200 rpm) as well. What would be the ideal setup for running Logic?
Thanks!
2011 iMac 27", 16 GB of RAM, Logic Pro 9.1.8, OS X 10.7.5

Thanks.
Already talked to the tech doing the installation and he said I can stay on Lion.
Going to get rid of the optical drive, like you suggested, and keep the internal HDD to work in conjunction with the SSD. So, I'll put my OS X and Logic on the SSD, samples on the internal HDD, and project folders on the external firewire drive. Is this what you suggest? Did I miss anything?

Best hard drive setup for Logic Pro?..

Hi all,
I'm about to get a Mac Pro, and I was wondering a bit about the best hard drive set up for running Logic Pro.
1. Should I go with Western Digital Caviar SE ? Noise is a primary issue, I'd like them to be as silent as possible. Could anybody tell me their experiences with this disc?.. I also hear that Samsungs Spinpoint are almost silent. Any truth to this? (I want my discs in sizes of 500Gb.)
2. Is this a good setup:
D1: Mac OS, Logic Pro
D2: Audio for Logic Pro
D3: Sample libraries, including direct from disc streaming.
3. I seem to remember from another post that someone wrote that raiding discs could actually decrease performance when working with audio. Is this the case?
Thanks,
Curvebender.
Message was edited by: curvebender
Message was edited by: curvebender

curvebender wrote:
2. Is this a good setup:
D1: Mac OS, Logic Pro
D2: Audio for Logic Pro
D3: Sample libraries, including direct from disc streaming.
Yes, excellent way to go. One suggestion: on your sample or audio drive, or an external FW, install a basic system + Logic app only. This enables you to have another system to boot from in case of trouble, or you can use it as a test bed for future updates etc. without affecting your primary system. You'd only boot into this drive in case of problems or for testing. I currently have Leopard running on one drive to test it out as I don't want to move to 10.5.x yet.

What's the best mac configuration setup for Logic?

I think that I didn't configure my Mac good enough to work with Logic and I hear that there is a special configuration that should be used to have everhything work together as best as possible in terems of memory use etc. But what are the best settings? And where do i configure them?

Are you talking about within logic or the actual system?
as far as logic is concerned, the preferences / audio tab will offer you most of the controls to optimize logic for your system.
as far as the actual mac, the best would obviously be a 12 core mac pro, speced till it would spec no more LOL.
but a I5 imac and that much ram is still a reasonable beast in the home studio stakes.
the best way to use all the RAM is to run logic in 64 bit,
find logics icon in the finder, and either right/ctrl click and click get info or press cmd-I.
this will bring up the get info dialog, and uncheck run in 32bit.
hey presto, logic can get to 16gb of RAM (in theory).

Mac mini 2014 or 2012 for logic pro x

Hello Guyzzzz
I am a beginner in Logic pro ( But not for a long time ) and was wondering if i should get a 2012 mac mini with a quad core I7 or if the new mac mini dual core I 7 should be powerful enough for logic ?
And for sure with 16Gb ram and Fusion drive 1 tb.
I want to take the new mac mini for the only reason that it can handle 4k ... so maybe in few month if apple released a 4K display I will be able to plug it
Thank you very much for your time and your help !
cheeeeers

thank you guys ! I had the chance to find a mac mini server I7 quad on the refurbished store !!!! waiting for it now alreay ordered the 16 gb ! And just checked the SSD prices from Crucial there are awesome haha !

Mac Pro Hard Drive Setup

Hi,
I am waiting delivery of a mac pro dual quad 2.8 and I am getting a 500GB option in bay 1
I am ordering 2 x Samsung (finger crossed) F1 1TB drives (Bay 2 and Bay 3).
My main use will be for producing music which will therefore run plug-ins instruments, effects, work with audio files...
*Would a setup like this be ok?*
*_Setup A_*
500GB Drive 1 = System and other applications (e.g. Logic Pro, virtual insrtuments, other apps)
1TB Drive 2 = Audio library (Samples, sounds from virtual instruments many GBs large, etc... )
1TB Drive 2 = all sort of stuff from scratch disk to personal family files like photos, movies, music, etc...)
Will then use external Hard Drive to back up stuff I don't want to lose
*_Setup B_*
500GB Drive 1 = System (too large for just system)
1TB Drive 2 = Applications
1TB Drive 3 = Data (audio files, audio library, personal photos-movies-music, etc...)
*_Other option?_*
If I want to have a dual but with Windows XP... will I be able to just add another Drive (Internal/External) for a d*ual boot start up?*
Thanks for any help
Message was edited by: TC_MACPRO
Message was edited by: TC_MACPRO

Either configuration should work fine. It's really entirely up to you. However, I note in your proposed configuration that there's no provision for backups. Since your work is obviously valuable to you, then you need a backup plan. Unfortunately, given what you will have there's only room for one more drive which can have a maximum size of 1.5 TBs. Not large enough to back up 2.5 TBs of extant capacity. I suggest you give some thought to the backup plan. You could use external Firewire drives for backup. Or you could make use of the two additional SATA drives that can be installed outside of the four existing bays. Unfortunately, there's not much room in the Mac Pro to install the drives internally.
Basic Backup
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware)
6. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
7. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
Although you can buy a complete FireWire drive system, you can also put one together if you are so inclined. It's relatively easy and only requires a Phillips head screwdriver (typically.) You can purchase hard drives separately. This gives you an opportunity to shop for the best prices on a hard drive of your choice. Reliable brands include Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Fujitsu. You can find reviews and benchmarks on many drives at Storage Review.
Enclosures for FireWire and USB are readily available. You can find only FireWire enclosures, only USB enclosures, and enclosures that feature multiple ports. I would stress getting enclosures that use the Oxford chipsets (911, 921, 922, for example.) You can find enclosures at places such as;
Cool Drives
OWC
WiebeTech
Firewire Direct
California Drives
NewEgg
All you need do is remove a case cover, mount the hard drive in the enclosure and connect the cables, then re-attach the case cover. Usually the only tool required is a small or medium Phillips screwdriver.

Mac Pro RAID 0 setup with bootcamp

I'm about to take the plunge and buy a Mac Pro as soon as I get the money (or credit) to. There have been things here and there that have turned me off but I found ways around some concerns, but this one I haven't been able to find.
I am a musician and want to utilize raw power that Mac does so well with. But unfortunately my DAW of choice doesn't support OS X. I hate Vista, I never upgraded, I stayed with XP but have been willing to change to OS X with XP as well, to get the best of both worlds. Then i find my DAW doesn't support XP 64 bit so i am going to have to use Vista 64-bit (bummer).
What I haven't been able to figure out is if it is possible to run a RAID 0 of the windows OS and all its data. The Mac Pro RAID card doesn't support any Windows OS so i am wondering if there is anyway possible to get the Windows OS in RAID, any good hardware or software that will accomplish this. Like if i get the Mac Pro RAID cad, is there a good software or hardware RAID that will allow me to install windows in a RAID 0 configuration?
If its possible I would have no reasons to not move over, but I really need to have my RAID setup in windows since I am using latency sensitive disk streaming programs that need to stream files in the GBs
Also could I just opt out for the Mac Pro Card and get a generic RAID card that supports both Windows and OS X? And if so any recommendations?
Message was edited by: jmoss211

I'm glad you are in the planning stages!
The question I didn't know to ask is always the one that bites the worst.
One of the best options might be the RR 4320
http://www.hptmac.com/US/product.php?_index=50&viewtype=details
http://www.barefeats.com/hard109.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Highpoint%20Technologies/RRAID4320/
One of the first Mac Pro RAID and Boot Camp work?
Games, hence the whole gaming graphics area, has and is not high on the list of features, which had been a large reason for people installing Windows on Mac.
I didn't want to see you invest in SAS and not get performance level you want.
StorageReview Performance SCSI/SAS vs VelociRaptor
Here is the card Barefeats felt was the card that Apple has to beat, and points to some of the limitations of SAS on the Mac Pro. http://www.barefeats.com/hard104.html
MacWorld SanFran in a couple weeks is when Apple traditionally would use to announce some of the new products for the next year (Snow, Mac Pro '09, new iMac, etc).
Apple is not very upgradeable. It would cost me more to upgrade the cpu than buy new (though can get a good $$ on my system - in part because it runs the prior version of OS X 10.4 "Tiger". New systems will only run the current/latest OS, you won't be able to run Leopard if a system comes with Snow. The graphic choices and upgrades can be lame. It is almost a closed box.)
I've talked to people that were into audio that used Fibre Channel in part due to low latency, increased queue depth (which is one area SATA has never implemented, 32 vs 256 I/O per sec).
+Forget trying to use the Apple search to find threads, it is 'busted' if I can't find the thread mbean and I had with someone only last week on RAID5/6. I turned to Google to find this thread +
Multi-core compiler optimization is big on Santa Intel's wish list to get into the hands of developers and vendors.
*3 GHz Nehalem outperforms the latest Opteron by a margin as high as 80% and more.*
Intel has apparently allowed HP and Fujitsu-Siemens to break the NDA on the Xeon 5570 processor for PR reasons as both companies have published SAP numbers on a Dual Xeon 5570. The Xeon 5570 is based on the same architecture as the Core i7. It is a 2.93 GHz quad-core CPU with 4 times a 256 KB L2-cache and one huge shared 8 MB L3.
http://anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=532
And AMD just gave Intel a new run for the money.
AnandTech’s Johan de Gelas has taken a look at AMD and Intel quad-socket servers. The quad-socket six-core Intel Xeon X7460 at 2.66 GHz is compared to the quad-socket four-core Shanghai-based Opteron 8384 at 2.7 GHz. And what were the results of a test using VMware’s ESX Server 3.5?
Shanghai’s 16 cores outperformed Dunnington’s 24 cores (or 48 if Hyper-Threading was used) by 6.5% or 8.8% depending on whether or not IBM or Dell’s chipset was used. But if we normalize that out per core, Shanghai outperforms by 59.8% (per core) or 63.2%. That is unbelievable!
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/amd-cleans-up-in-high-end-server-virtualizati on-20081223/

Mac pro with 16GB RAM for CS3? CS3 cant use more than 3 GB? why

hi
does it make any sense to buy 16GB RAM for a mac pro
only for working with CS3?
i am retouching prof. and in the moment we run CS2 on the mac pro.
later CS3 is in the pipeline.
we ordered 16GB RAM in order to work with HDR images and big file sizes coming from hasselblad h2 and h3 (300dpi, 23 x 23inch, round 50 or 100 layers, filesize 1 - 2GB per image.)
thanks

found this article @ adobe website
thanks for your help!
"When you run Photoshop CS3 on a 64-bit operating system, such as Mac OS X v10.4 and later, Photoshop can access up to 8 GB of RAM. You can see the actual amount of RAM Photoshop can use in the Let Photoshop Use number when you set the Let Photoshop Use slider in the Performance preference to 100%. The RAM above the 100% used by Photoshop, which is from approximately 3 GB to 3.7 GB, can be used directly by Photoshop plug-ins (some plug-ins need large chunks of contiguous RAM), filters, and actions. If you have more than 4 GB (to 8 GB), the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data. Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can increase performance of Photoshop.
The default RAM allocation setting in Photoshop CS3 is 70%. These settings should be optimal for most users. To get the ideal RAM allocation setting for your system, change the RAM allocation in 5% increments and watch the performance of Photoshop in the Activity Monitor. You must quit and restart Photoshop after each change to see the change take effect.
The available RAM shown in the Performance preferences has already deducted an amount that is reserved for the operating system from the total RAM in your computer. You shouldn't set the percentage of RAM to be used by Photoshop to 100% (unless you are using more than 2G of RAM) because other applications which run at the same time as Photoshop (for example, Adobe Bridge CS3) need a share of the available RAM. Some applications use more RAM than you might expect. For example, web browsers can use 20-30 MB of RAM, and music players can use 20-50 MB of RAM. Watch the Activity Monitor to view the RAM allocations on your computer.
Watch your efficiency indicator while you work in Photoshop to determine the amount of RAM you'll need to keep your images in RAM. The efficiency indicator is available from the pop-up menu on the status bar of your image or from the Palette Options on the Info Palette pop-up menu. When the efficiency indicator goes below 95-100%, you are using the scratch disk. If the efficiency is around 60%, you'll see a large performance increase by changing your RAM allocation or adding RAM."

Mac Pro 4,1 SATA for OS and RAID SAS for data?

Hello, Can I setup a new Mac Pro with two SATA drives for the OS and install a RAID Card and two SAS drives for data?
Or do they all have to be SAS or SATA drives in the machine? Meaning I cannot mix SATA and SAS.
Thanks,
Dean

Even MacWorld magazine liked the OWC drives.
If you are serious about using an SSD drive, they are generally too small for, and do not give enough speed improvement to, extensive documents, movies, pictures, Tunes, and so on. You should consider moving the /Users directory to a traditional Hard Drive.
Blocks on SDD drives can sustain a finite number of writes, thought to be in the neighborhood of 10,000. Some Cloning software is thought to do an abusive number of writes during cloning, so it may be better to install the System from scratch onto your new SSD.
I am an advocate of occasionally consolidating free space on an SSD drive and Zeroing it. Since these drives tend to be organized internally as really big blocks, eliminating small "free" blocks (with leftover data in them) may allow some drives to do fewer slow Read-Modify-Write cycles. This practice is, at best, controversial.

2006 Mac Pro corrupting the disk - possible logic board problem?

Hi there.
I bought a faulty MP (2006) that wouldn't install an OSX. It would install to a point and then fail or install fully then not boot. Apparently this happened shortly after a 10.5.8 update failed mid way. The seller told me how it seemed to corrupt hard disks placed into it. How he diagnosed this I don't know.
I bought it and did a fresh 10.6 install on a formatted disk in my other 2006 mac pro. Then swapped the disk into the faulty mac pro. Everything seemed fine. Booted up and seemed to work fine.
Upon trying to install itunes 9 I had all sorts of issues (which I've read about). Upon doing a disk check in disk utility it seems the disk has loads of errors, imcomplete nodes/trees etc. Repairing the disk isn't working (in the OS as well as booting from the DVD).
Has anyone encountered anything like this? It seems the disk is getting corrupted by something or other. Hardware tests check out fine.
Could this be a problem on the Logic board?
Thanks

One thing I did notice that I thought was odd was on the grey boot screen a small empty progress bar appears for a second or two and then vanishes. Sure this is the same progress bar that appears on an efi update etc.... not sure it's connected

Mac Pro Hard Drive Setup Question

Mr. FedEx brought me my Mac Pro today and I'm getting ready to set it up. I'm migrating from a PowerBook G4 17 inch and got the Mac Pro 3.0 GHz, 8 GB RAM, and four 500 GB hard drives. I figure I should do a freash install of Aperture instead of using the Migration Wizard. The question for the night is, how should I handle the four hard drives? Out of the box I see four seperate hard drives labled Macintosh HD. For Aperture, should I use software raid across all four drives or only three leaving the OS drive by itselft for applications?
Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Sure you can... I got a Raid 0 on two 300Gb drives on my boot drive... They host the OS and my apps.
The trick is that its got to be a fresh install. You boot with your hardware giag disk and in the menu you have the disk utility. Create the RAID setup and then quit. You can now boot the disk with the OS install and it will recognize it as such.
Now - a few things to consider. Next version of OS X has Time Machine that that expects a volume (a disk, the whole disk) for it to work. So it would be cool if you find out about it and sort of prepare for it.
Having said that I would Raid0 two pairs and Raid1 the two. This is called Raid 1+0 or Raid 10. Its a good compromise but if drive 1 AND 3 fail then there is no backup. I would also get an external firewire disk (say 300Gb or 500Gb) and use it as a vault. But that is because I can't think of running the machine with a full backup of what I got, still not a perfect solution.
The way I got it is using Raid 0 on my OS and Apps (600Gb) with an external Firewire disk for backup. (no Raid 0 - so there is no statistical odds to beat)
Apeture has two drives. Two Firewire 800 (1Tb) drives, one the library and the other is the vault. The vault also stores the deleted images, so you will have to clean every now and then or it will grow faster than your library.
http://www.terraoptica.com

2nd hand Mac Pro: what to look for? Want later models

Hi everyone
I have a 27" iMac tha tis a couple of years old. I have outgrown the 1tb hd, and would prefer to go for a standard desktop design to make adding and changing drives easier. I want to avoid obsolence. I am not looking for a very new model, but one that is a current design. Can anyone give tips on how to determine how recent used Mac Pros i come across are?
Thanks in advance for any tips you can pass on!
John

Additional information for completeness:
The 2008 model and previous are Very Different from the 2009 and later. The 2009 and later can accept much more memory and that memory is substantially cheaper. The 2009 and later with the same number and nominal speed of processors approaches twice as fast in benchmarks due to architectural differences
So if you expect to do compute and memory intensive modeling, Photo, Video, or Audio editing, limit your hunt to the 2009 model and later.
If you are doing general work that does not involve large memory sizes, any model Mac Pro will work for you.

HT4889 Just got a new macbook pro. Trying to migrate data from a MacPro to the macBook. MacBook will recognize the Mac Pro but not vice versa. Using Mac OS X 10.6.8 on the Mac Pro(powermac G4. The Mac Pro searches in vain for the MacBook. What should I do

Just bought a new MacBook Pro. Attempting to migrate data from a power mac G4 running Mac OS X 10.6.8 using a firewire.
Mac Book will recognize the Mac Pro but the Mac Pro just continues to search for the Mac Book. What should I do?
Dave VanHorn
[email protected]

Put the G4 into Target Disk Mode and open Migration Assistant on the new MBP. Your G4 needs to be running 10.5.8.

Mac Pro ideal HD setup for Logic?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for