An SSD-based MPG Pro Workstation Design with Fault-tolerant Time Machine Backup
I did an interesting system design today for a consulting client. After evaluating his specific computing needs (which do not involve much storage capacity), we ended up with this very high performance system, which is a quiet, fast and robust MPG Pro Workstation (Mac Pro, setup ready to use and pre-tested). The client chose the 3.33GHz 6-core Mac Pro for this configuration.
Three solid state drives (Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD) configured as follows—
- Internal 240GB SSD as volume Boot, for system and applications, and some user data, like Mail and Calendar, etc.
- Internal 240GB SSD as volume Master, for storing larger amounts of user data such as image files and music and spreadsheets/word processing files.
- Internal 240GB SSD as volume Parallels (independent space for running Windows using Parallels virtualization software).
In addition—
- For a fault-tolerant TimeMachine volume, 2TB RAID-1 mirror for fast internal backup every hour. See my Time Machine how-to.
- Dual 5770 video cards to support dual dual-link DVI-D displays.
- 24GB memory.
This system should yield years of high-performance computing, with low noise, noise power, and high reliability.