Massive storage.
The Mac Pro comes with four 3.5-inch internal hard drive bays for an enormous amount of internal storage — up to 4TB when you install four 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drives. Each bay provides its own independent 3Gb/s channel for fast access to data. And thanks to the cable-free, direct-attach installation system, adding (or replacing) hard drives is a surprisingly simple process.
Ready to RAID.
Using Mac OS X, you can stripe two, three, or all four hard drives in a RAID 0 array to increase performance and create a massive volume for video editing; or create a RAID 1 mirror for protecting your critical digital media assets against a drive failure. For the ultimate in data protection and enhanced performance, add the optional Mac Pro RAID Card with 256MB of RAID cache, a 72-hour cache-protecting battery, and hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 0+1. Apple’s RAID Utility software makes setting up and managing the RAID card easy.
Ultimate SAS.
You can also choose ultrafast 15,000-rpm Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 3Gb/s drives with 300GB of capacity for the highest in disk I/O performance. Together with the Mac Pro RAID Card, these drives provide 250MB/s of RAID 5 disk I/O performance.1 That’s enough data to play back one stream of 10-bit uncompressed HD content. It’s the ultimate storage solution for highly demanding data transfer situations like editing uncompressed HD video content or updating ultra-high-resolution images.
Double-layer burner, times two.
Sure it’s great to have one 16x SuperDrive at your disposal, but think how much more productive you could be with two. Imagine backing up your data to two double-layer DVDs at once. Or burning Aperture projects to one DVD, while importing music from a CD into your iTunes library. With two optical drive bays in every system, the Mac Pro lets you do exactly that.
SAS RAID 5 vs SATA RAID 5. Read and write performance.1
Simultaneous Final Cut Pro streams. Three-drive SAS RAID 5 vs. SATA RAID 5 performance.
- Testing conducted by Apple in December 2007 using preproduction 8-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro units. Testing was conducted using Iometer 2006.07.27 with a 30-second ramp-up, 5-minute run duration, 512KB request size, and 4 outstanding IOs. The test system was configured in a two-volume configuration with a single JBOD drive for the OS and the remaining three drives as the test volume on which Iometer tests were performed. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Pro RAID Card.
