Apple Mac Pro MA970LL/A Desktop (Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, 16x SuperDrive)
This is a rather long review and if you are not a big time firewire drive user I have made a brief synopses of this review in the first two paragraphs. Note that this computer was purchased the first of January 2009. I have delayed writing this review to give Apple every chance to come clean about the FW problem.
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The three star rating is primarily due to the inability of apple to deliver on its promise of reliable FW 800 performance on the MacPro or the Macbook computers and their lack of responsiveness when confronted with an actual user that wants and needs to mount many FW disks.
The other contributor to the 3 star rating has to do with the speed of the MacPro. While Photoshop and Lightroom are much more responsive than my MacMini (1.5 GHz G4), I would expect an 8 core (2 x 2.8 GHz Intel Xenon) to literally blow the doors off the MacMini. The other applications that I use are also faster, but not dramatically so.
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I purchased this high performance MacPro Tower because my MacMini and Macbook Pro 15 were beginning to show signs that the large digital photo files that I work with were a little too much, particularly on the MacMini. The MacMini is an earlier G4 model. Also, Photoshop CS4 is optimized for Intel. I also use Adobe Lightroom to manage my large database of digital photographs, currently approaching 40,000 files.
Since I do not trust hard drives and I am disinclined to spend hours creating DVD archive disks, I maintain many, many firewire drives to archive and backup my photographic library. I copy each CF card that I use when shooting photographs to no less than 4 separate hard drives before deleting the files from the cards. I use Lexar Professional CF cards exclusively.
As FW 800 drives came available I have been buying the triple interface Maxtor III drives expecting to use them in FW 800 mode when I finally upgraded my MacMini with a new tower computer. I have 12 of these drives including 2 500 GB, 6 300 GB, and 4 2 TB devices. I have been using these drives without problem on my MacMini as I purchased them without issues. Of course the initial drive of that chain had to attach through the FW 400 port of the MacMini because the G4 MacMini does not have a FW 800 port.
When the MacPro came in I naturally wanted to move these drives to the MacPro and leave the FW 400 drives attached to the MacMini. I have another 16 or so FW 400 drives that I have acquired over the last several years.
Unfortunately, the FW 800 implementation seems to be flawed. If I try to mount several FW 800 drives, at some point, the FW 800 chain appears to get `confused' and the drives spontaneously unmount. This means that I cannot mount all of my drives at the same time. Typically I can only mount 5 or 6 drives before I experience problems. Worse still, I have experienced file corruption when copying photo files from either my FW 400 or my FW 800 CF card reader. I have since spoken with another photographer (another long time Mac user) and he said that he had the same problem with trying to mount multiple drives. His work-around is to only use one FW 800 drive at a time.
In addition to the FW 800 problem, the FW 400 ports also seem to have problems with using multiple drives simultaneously. On my MacMini and on my Macbook Pro I have mounted nearly every drive that I own (more than 30 firewire drives) using the FW 400 port. The FW 800 drives are connected with each other via the FW 800 ports and with the rest of the chain via a FW 400 port on the triple interface drives. This is how the drives were used prior to the MacPro purchase.
Interestingly, when I tried to mount several FW 800 drives to the Macbook Pro; it too would lose the chain at some point.
I called apple support a couple of times concerning this problem. The techs on the phone suggested zapping the pram, etc., which I did to no avail. The last call was escalated to a higher level in the support and was subsequently turned over to the hardware folks. I was assured I would receive a telephone call and an email with some information concerning the Firewire problem, but after a week I had no futher response. Fortunately, I had sent some screen shots to the tech at apple, so I had an email address. When I emailed a reminder, he finally sent (forwarded) the email that he received from the hardware folks.
To make a long story short, apple blew me off saying that there was something wrong with my drives, etc. I replied that I wanted information concerning the FW 800 testing that apple did to verify that FW 800 could mount 63 drives, since I couldn't get it to mount 6 drives reliably. All I received in reply was silence.
I spent many, many hours testing the MacPro, the MacMini, and the Macbook using various combinations of FW drives, FW card readers and USB 2.0 card readers. I worked on this problem on a regular basis for nearly 3 months. I offered apple to be a beta tester for their FW issues since I do have so many devices and apparently, apple has never tested their own interface to anywhere close to its limits.
The three star rating is primarily due to the inability of apple to deliver on its promise of reliable FW 800 performance on the MacPro or the Macbook computers and their lack of responsiveness when confronted with an actual user that wants and needs to mount many FW disks.
While I was able to successfully use the Macbook with many FW 400 drives (including the FW 800 drives when the FW 800 chain was initially connected via FW 400), I was never able to repeat this with the MacPro computer using the FW 400 ports. I also had to abandon using the FW card readers and revert to the USB 2.0 reader to eliminate corrupted files during transfer to the MacPro computer. Furthermore, I now only use the MacPro internal drives (4) and one (at-a-time) FW 800 drives for my photography. The digital archiving with the addition copies had to return to the MacMini.
The other contributor to the 3 star rating has to do with the speed of the MacPro. While Photoshop and Lightroom are much more responsive than my MacMini (1.5 GHz G4), I would expect an 8 core (2 x 2.8 GHz Intel Xenon) to literally blow the doors off the MacMini. The other applications that I use are also faster, but not dramatically so.
I have been a Macintosh user since the 512k Fat Mac. I have evolved through the LC, the IIci, S900 (clone), iMac, Power Mac G4, Powerbook, and finally the MacMini on the AIM chips to the Intel based Macbook and Mac Pro. In all these prior computers, I have never had a problem with apple or their computers till now. I have also used Intel PCs and Sun workstations at work (reluctantly in the case of the Windows PCs.). I am not an apple basher nor a PC basher, but at this point, I could not recommend a Macintosh computer to anyone that required a lot of drive space that needed to be online. I have in excess of 15 TB of FW storage that I cannot safely use with my most recent computer.
So, if you like apple hardware and you don't stress the firewire ports, this is a good machine. If you have a large investment in firewire drives, I would recommend that you keep what you have. Since most PCs don't come with firewire ports that would mean: Keep your old Mac and bug apple to get the bugs out of firewire 800. I understand that the new Macbooks don't come with FW 400 ports, so I would be careful there, as well.
Buy Apple Mac Pro MA970LL/A Desktop (Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, 16x SuperDrive)!
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