An SSD-based MPG Pro Workstation Design with Fault-tolerant Time Machine Backup

2011-12-23 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: backup, fault tolerance, Other World Computing, SSD

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro

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.