Installed Tiger today

[Ottawaman]

So I have had Tiger sitting here for months, but didn't want to install it right away.
Today I bit the bullet.
The install went without a problem. I used install and archive to upgrade.
So now I'm playing with all the widgets.
It's a lot of fun.
Perhaps I should have done this sooner, but I didn't want any issues with my pro apps.
I installed Final cut pro Studio last week, that also went well.
So it's been a good week for me and my mac :)

[Just Doug1]

Sounds good. You have to like it when stuff goes well.

[Ottawaman]

Yup :D
I also picked up 2 Sandisk 256 meg usb 2 keys from dell today 32$ shipped tax incl.
I got one for my wife and 1 for me( not that I really need it, but for that price, who cares) ;)

[Just Doug1]

More toys! Kudos.

[Ottawaman]

Toys make living fun!

[Child of Cupertino]

Just in the process of housecleaning and archiving my files for a BIG upgrade to Tiger. I actually want to wipe the drive and install a fresh OS -- AND experiment with whether or not a striped RAID is really helping me or not. Almost ALL of my files are well under 20MB, most being samples that are probably 2 or 3 MB in size -- but I load in a GAJLLION of them in one song load. So, I'm unsure as to whether or not a RAID is really beneficial for me, given the hazards of a striped RAID. I do like the single, big fat disk icon, however, and I have external FW drives to back up to.

Any thoughts? I'll post any results off speed testing when ready.

[Ottawaman]

I installed a 200 gig firewire hd about two weeks ago. I find it is doing a great job of not dropping frames when I capture video in final cut pro.
In your current situation, I think data integrity is the key feature to consider.
I think raid is a good idea if you don't like to do back ups very often. I guess I'm suggesting that you consider a raid that is based towards data integrity versus speed.

raid 1 offers data mirroring.

[Just Doug1]

Would you guys have any solution similar to this IDE RAID 5 card?

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr454.htm

5 ATA133 drives is it's sweet spot.

[Ottawaman]

http://www.barefeats.com/hard36.html

[Just Doug1]

Interesting. Am I correct in that it's a striped set only with no parity? I no SATA so not sure if such could be set up.

[Child of Cupertino]

I'm back.

Well, running Tiger now. Ran Xbench for the tests. The striped RAID gives me about 15 to 20MB/second more speed on sequential reads and writes with 256K and 4K blocks of data. The sequential read speed for 4K blocks was the significant exception: RAID 17.43MB/second, versus 23.42MB/second non-RAID (see attachment).

BTW, this is a software RAID, utilizing a dual channel ATA133 PCI card, two 180GB Hitachi Deskstar 7200rpm 8MB cached drives, with the fsb @ a humble 100MHz.

Any opinions on this?

Also, when I formatted, there was an option to change the RAID block size, which was defaulted (and where I l left it) at 32K. What does this mean? And, given my gear, should I change it?

[Child of Cupertino]

Kind of found some light regarding block size. if you deal with larger file sizes, go with a bigger block size. Smaller file sizes (which i think I would fall into), then go with smaller block sizes:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=DiskUtility/10.5/en/duh1003.html

[Child of Cupertino]

Just to clarify the typical file sizes I use, most of the time I'm loading smaller sized samples (say, between 256k up to 2MB) but I load up A GAJILLION of them. Once in a while, I record up to ten minutes of audio, handling around 110MB file sizes.

EDIT: When Googling about this, I also came across this FAQ at Charismac:

http://www.charismac.com/Support/RAID/raidfaq.html#1

They say:

What segment size should I use on my array?

Answer: Charismac RAID's default segment size is 64k. We have worked with several digital video and audio users and have found this to be the optimal setting for both digital video and audio.


BUT, perhaps that's not using a striped RAID as a boot disk like I am?? :confused:

[Ottawaman]

In adressing the performance of an raid array with different stripe sizes, you miss an important factor, namely the accestime of an disk. This wait time has two main couses. First the head positioning and second the rotational latency (the heads track the right trace, but position where the read start has not passed under the head). You may have to wait from 0 to (in the worst case) a full cycle.
Since the disks move independently You can calculate that the average latency to get an small file is minimal when the stripe size is about an full cycle of an disk in the array (aprox. 250kB today). All other factors I do know do not reduce this. (controller overhead, transport,...)
So I think that today a minimum stripe size of 256kB should be used.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491&p=5

[Ottawaman]

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/tiger/drive.html

[Child of Cupertino]

Awesome link, Ottawaman :) thanks! (tests still in progress)

[Ottawaman]

let me know how you make out, I'm not very knowledgeable about raid, but, you seem to be on the right track

[Child of Cupertino]

Well, it was a close call between the default 32K and a 64K block size. But, I'm sticking with the 32K.

Generally, the Xbench scores were a bit better with 64K, but I came across an OS X disk test utility, called IOGauge (http://www.asteratech.com/products/iogauge.htm), that gave a more consistently higher result with 32K -- but a significantly higher result, either. After repeating the tests on ONE format alone, the results are all over the place. Ditto when reformatting and testing with a different block size.

The great thing about Tiger is that Frankenmac FINALLY got over the 140 mark on Xbench! I have been wanting that little notch on my bedpost and was chagrined that my RAID didn't do it. But there are significant improvements to Tiger's RAID that pushed Frankie's score from a top Panther score of 139.x to a top Tiger score of 148.x, averaging around 145.x!

Seeing as this is probably the last major OS release before the Macintels come out, I'm glad to see how Tiger purrs! Now, to install Logic Pro and see how THAT performs.

[Ottawaman]

Well, it sounds like you're having fun with Tiger

[Tim]

Funny you guys are doing the upgrade, I'm about to do it myself.

Macromedia released studio 8 and I'm just waiting until I finish the 2 big projects before I do it.

Raid I'm on the fence. It is definitely fast. I have it. However the raptors on SATA are damn fast to.

[Ottawaman]

I saw that Macromedia put out studio 8, but don't really know what enhancements it provides. I guess I'll go have a look.

[Child of Cupertino]

Funny you guys are doing the upgrade, I'm about to do it myself.

I've been waiting for months! now that the series is over, I can make the jump. Everything's going swell :)

[Tim]

swell as in production is good? Or it' boots up good.
:)

[Child of Cupertino]

Mornin'!

It boots up good.

But Spotlight is acting very WIERD. Unless I'm using it wrong, it can't find some things that I know that are there. Gonna check that out.

Also, iPhoto won't load and the library. Even though menus are accessible (for fun, I added a photo album and that snapped iPhoto out of being stuck), it doesn't read an existing library, can't seem to save any added photos, and I have to force quit. There are others complaining about this out there, but no solutions seem to be working for me (want to check to see if any worked for them, either).