Upgrade Lust
One of the great things of having a Mac Pro is that the thing is so upgradeable. One of the worst about having a Mac Pro is that I can’t afford to upgrade it. Yes, it’s sadly true, my beautiful tower of power still sits in it’s standard configuration. It’s paltry RAM, low-end video card, and single hard drive silently mocking me. Most of the time I am able to shrug it off and be satisfied with my beast of a machine. But every once in a while something so cool comes along that I wish I could buy it right then and there.
Yesterday I stumbled across this little beauty from transintl.com. It’s a replacement drive sled for the Mac Pro with a very cool twist. It allows you to mount two 2.5” (laptop) hard drives in a single bay and set them up in either RAID 0 (for capacity and speed) or RAID 1 (for redundancy).
Barefeats.com did some benchmarks and the RAID 0 configuration is fast. At least when it comes to sustained reading and writing, the random read/write (i.e. common, everyday usage was fast, but not as fast as other drives). People working in video or similar fields are going to love this.
What excites me about it is the RAID 1 configuration. I would love to get one just to use as a location for my media files. Just set up my iTunes and iPhoto to store their files on that drive and have instant redundancy for those very important files. Combine it with Time Machine and you have triple redundancy (although, no offsite backup).
Someday, I am going to upgrade this beast and when I do, this will definitely be on the buy list.