At the office I have a Mac Pro (Early 2009) with four 1Tb Hard Drives, 20 Gb of RAM and two NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 connected to one 30" Apple Cinema Display and two 23" Apple Cinema Displays. In the past I was a happy developer, now I am starting to complain a bit about speed. At home I have a Macbook Pro with a 250Gb SSD drive and a thunderbolt 27" display that is faster :-/…
I am not sure about what to do, should I upgrade my Mac Pro with some SSDs? A Sonnet Tempo PCIe card ($300) with one or two Samsung 850 EVO SSDs ($450 each) and maybe a better graphic card like the NVIDIA GTX 680 ($600) or should I purchase a new computer… A Mac Mini seems very limited, an iMac a bit limited too, a new Mac Pro? I am only running Xojo, Safari, Mail, … not even Photoshop.
I like speed but I am not fond of changing computer too often. I also like to work with 3 displays and I like to have a second hard drive with Time Machine 
Any recommendation? Most of my friends and relatives are telling me to buy a new Mac Pro… but it is quite expensive… not sure if spending $1000-$1500 in my existing Mac Pro is the way to go or not…
Thanks in advance,
Stan
I’d say your bottleneck is the speed of the harddisks, so I’d use an SSD for the OS (though Samsung might not be your best bet due to Trim issues and its poor Mac support for firmware updates).
You might also consider replacing the four old 1TB HDs with two faster 4 TB HybridHDs.
I agree with Markus - there’s no better upgrade to a Mac than going SSD.
If compile times and usual CPU performance in general are fine (and I think they will be), I would also recommend to install an SSD (or create a Fusion Drive with one of the HDDS). This makes a huuuuge difference in performance.
I don’t think a new graphics card would be wise for $600. It won’t reach comparable speed to recent models very probably.
I just recently replaced my Mac Pro 2009 (better graphics card, 24 GB RAM, self built Fusion Drive) but only because Photoshop use is times faster on a new iMac, and that’s because of the GPU (and me usually having to fix PS files with +200 MB/layer). Every other app and general performance was absolutely satisfying and never made me wish to have a new Mac.
Oh, and I used a Samsung Pro SSD for the Fusion Drive. With Trim Enabler no problems!
Are you running Yosemite? Then don’t forget to disable it before system updates or you’ll get a nasty surprise (Mac won’t boot due to unsigned kernel driver)
Well, for Xojo, you need only one core currently. And that one should be boostable to higher CPU frequency. Because that helps for building in Xojo. And Xojo only uses up to 3 or 4 GB of memory.
Having an extra CPU core for the background stuff is nice.
4 GB RAM and 2 cores with a good 3 GHz maximum speed for one core, can be okay. And a Mac Mini can do that!
If you run VMs to test e.g. Windows or Linux, maybe add 2 GB of memory and another core.
In that case it’s nice to have 4 or more CPU cores and 8 or more GB of RAM.
Of course if you build plugin like me with Xcode, work is spread on all cores. Building my plugins could easily get 30 cores busy!
It’s currently running 10.10.2, and I never had problems with System updates on it.
(But with the Migration assistent when changing to the iMac. And then with Harddisk Toolkit being unable to reformat the internal iMac Apple Fusion Drive. And then with HD toolkit being unable to merge the lost partitions
but that was all on the new iMac, not on the Mac Pro with custom FD.)
Did you set up your fusion drive with Trim Enabler before upgrading to 10.2?
Are you sure Trim Enabler is on? Or have you completely disabled kext signing security?
I hope for you that the update to 10.3 won’t bring a grey screen on booting then
See https://www.cindori.org/trim-enabler-and-yosemite/
Of course, a SSD will boost the boot time and the whole computer speed.
BUT: you may fall (a little bit) into the same low speed after sometimes.
To avoid that, you have to have a (fast) boot disk that have enough free room (20% of free space to far more), and a relatively fresh OS install.
OS Install: if you use the migration tool, you probably copy the reasons why you fell the low speed.
If you can get a free external hard disk (7200rpm or SSD), install Yosemite on it (if possible), then measure the boot time with the internal HD and that external HD.
On a MacBook Pro 15" (2009-11), the use of an internal 1TB / 7200 rpm gets me a 45 seconds boot time vs the old 500GB who took around 3 minutes or more
Brand new Mavericks install (last year).
My current MacBook Pro 13" retina (mid-2014) tooks 20 seconds to boot.
Go figure.
About this… did anyone tried Angelbird SSD ?
They say they can provide native trim support in Yosemite, but don’t know if they are reliable as SSDs
Don’t go Samsung, get the OWC Accelsior. You don’t have to worry about this TRIM crap at all because it does its own garbage collection. OWC is a very, very Mac oriented company, it’ll work perfectly for you.
From all that I have read I have to agree with Thom regarding the OWC Accelsior and the quality of their products.
I just put a Crucial SSD in the 2nd optical drive of my 2009 Mac Pro (just a 250GB to use purely for system and apps) and the overall speed increase for day to day work (where I have to switch between lots of apps throughout the day) is nothing short of astonishing. Best £80 I’ve ever spent.
When you have the option setting up a Mac Fusion Drive makes life so much nicer. It’s a bit of a pain when you already have a dual-storage setup, but for anybody transitioning from a single-storage setup to a dual-storage setup, absolutely read up on setting up the fusion drive.
For somebody already using dual-storage that wants to migrate to a fusion drive, the first step would be to move everything back to the largest storage device. Then create a time machine backup, setup the fusion drive, and restore the backup. It’s possible, I’ve done it for my brother, but it’s definitely a bit more involved.
So Stan, here’s my advice for reviving that old computer:
- Upgrade to 10.8.3 or newer if you have not already.
- Create a standalone installer on a usb stick. Google this, as the steps are different for each version.
- Create a full backup using Time Machine.
- Install an OWC Mercury Accelsior.
- Setup the new Accelsior and your existing hard drive as a fusion drive: http://www.macworld.com/article/2014011/how-to-make-your-own-fusion-drive.html - this will erase your hard drive, that’s why the backup is important.
- Boot from your installer and restore your backup to the new fusion drive.
At first, you probably won’t notice a significant change in performance. This is because the system needs to determine what files are used most frequently and move them to the SSD. After a couple days of usage, performance should be dramatically better, and your workflow will not have changed at all.
I should have noticed you said four 1TB drives. That makes life a little more complicated. If you can get everything onto a single backup, you can put all four drives and the ssd into the fusion drive. But getting that much storage onto a single backup device can be challenging. Since you are no stranger to managing multiple storage devices, leaving the ssd as-is is probably the best option. But my instructions are there for anybody else who may need them.