MacDirectory Magazine

FEA TURE 1.0TB model and $450 for their new 4.0TB model. Like their single-drive enclosures, these cool running, aluminum bodied Elite-AL Pro have been a longtime choice for storage that pushes the edge of the performance envelope. To really take advantage of the speed provided by a RAID-0, you’ll want to use an interface a good deal faster than your pokey old FireWire 800. For this you’ll need a… eSATA PCI X card - $ XX The folks at Newer Technology recently introduced their MAXPower PCI 2.0 controller card that’s an easy and relatively cheap (under $60) that can handle a data transfer rate of up to 600MB/second, roughly six times faster than FireWire 800. Even if you’ve just attached it to a single eSATA enclosure, as we did in our testing, we saw some dramatic 50-70% improvements in our write speeds with a single, 7,200 RPM drive, though the read speeds showed little difference. OWC also offers a variety of quad-interface external drives (and empty enclosures for those of us who like to build our own) with the eSATA connection. CUDA Graphics - $$$-$$$$ XXXX Even though it’s a great idea, Adobe didn’t consider the Open CL (computing language) initiative quite ready for prime time as they worked to bring their Mercury Rendering Engine to market. So, they went with NVIDIA’s proprietary and more mature CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). The result is breathtaking real-time rendering in Premiere Pro as well as other welcome (albeit less spectacular) improvements in other graphics-intensive CS5 applications. NVIDA has two CUDA graphics offerings for the Mac. The GeForce GTX 285 is a great gaming and pro-sumer audio/video card for under $500. For media pros (as well as design engineers), the Quadro FX 4800 for the Mac is the only way to go. (You’ll find a full review of the latter elsewhere in this issue.) The use of OpenCL in applications and even your OS is growing, so more and more compute- intense programs are farming out work to your graphics card. So almost any investment in a new board will show you a performance payoff. Just hang onto your Pro’s original card for when it comes time to sell. With a heavyweight graphics card, you cantake it with you when it does come time to move up to a new machine. Staying Healthy Even if you’re not pushing your system to its limit, being prepared to deal with problems is always important. Fast hard drives and RAIDS tend to get their file systems tangled up more easily than their slower counterparts. And, added hardware of any sort makes things more challenging. So you should leave some room in your budget for some software tools that help you keep things running smoothly. We highly recommend Prosoft Engineering’s Drive Genius($99) (the latest version is reviewed in this issue) and Alsoft’s Disk Warriorto resolve and prevent drive issues. When Apple’s Disk Utility says it can’t repair a problem, one of these two often can. For many years now, Micromat’s TechTool Pro($98) has been the best utility for tracking down hardware issues and sports some very respectable drive utilities, as well. In terms of expandability, performance and just plain quality, it’s safe to say that Apple has never built a better desktop than the Mac Pro. Though there’s a speedy new box in the pipeline, you’ll find that your older machine still lots of potential to keep up with a growing workload. Resources for the power-hungry: Other World Computing: Newer Technology NVIDIA: Western Digital: Prosoft Engineering Micromat Alsoft Key to icons Price: $ - Under $100 $$ - $100 to $250 $$$ - $250 to $50 $$$$ - $500 - Don’t tell your spouse Performance: X- Some improvement XX- Definitely noticeable XXX- A real time-saver XXXX- Yeah, baby! wdfVR HLHX RAID with eSATA Newer Tech eSATA card 40 MacDirectory

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