@thecreativeone91 said:

@creayt said:

@scottalanmiller Good call. Can you suggest a good tool to do that with?

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/314145-what-is-the-best-i-o-iops-testing-tool-out-there

That's what I found last night, installed it, tried to run something obvious but it looks like it requires a bit of an investment in setting up testing. Was hoping for something a little bit simpler to just plug and play, but I can definitely dig into it when I get some downtime. Thx.

@scottalanmiller Good call. Can you suggest a good tool to do that with?

Drives are deployed. Benchmarks attached.

The left is a Raid 10 of 10K 6 Gbps SAS drives, to the right is the Raid 10 of 6 Gbps SSDs. Thanks to everyone for the help.

Hoping to save myself some hunting

Just put in way, way, way too much Mario Kart 8 w/ the gf. Wayyyyyy.

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt that seems really crappy to me, we have a huge fleet of plastic fantastic Dell Latitudes and they take HUGE abuse. Drops, spills (of weird chemicals on occasion), bodily fluids.... just the worst possible stuff you can imagine. We do suffer some attrition but it's typically because I refuse to clean it (human hazmat I am not) or someone has one stolen.

That's impressive. The day the very first retina MacBook Pro came out I got one and took it to my office, and someone spilled some coffee on it ( the lid was shut, thank god ) and it permanently nuked the displayport jacks ( can't remember if they were Thunderbolt or not yet ). Had to pay a pretty penny to get stuff replaced at the Apple Store.

@thecreativeone91 said:

@MattSpeller said:

@thecreativeone91 Wow that thing is a yard sale after those stairs

Yeah they say the aluminum uni-body is suppose to be stronger than plastic laptops. I've found them to be much more malleable than quality built plastic ones. Also every mac laptop I've had has had cooling issues.

Totally agree. One time I had a retina MBP on my bed and got into a tickle fight and it was a low profile box-springless frame, and it fell literally like 3 feet or so, the corner was dented beyond repair and I had to sell it at a huge loss. The unibody looks good, but as far as durability, I've noticed no difference.

@scottalanmiller said:

The answer is... they are much better now. Way better. Useful, actually. But are they great? Nope. Good enough, sure. Useable. But flaky, slow and hard to use. They require way too much "desktop expertise" for basic tasks. With Windows and Linux you never have to do things like "Google how to rename a file." They have obvious, graphical, on screen clues for things. Mac is "if you aren't a Mac expert, go away." Least inviting OS ever.

Agree. Only I think that even if you are a Mac expert, you're still fundamentally constrained in a lot of usage scenarios and forced to do things more slowly and less efficiently than on Windows. On top of that the interface/OS performance in general is just palpably slower in almost all situations. Some things are pretty, others are nightmarishly ugly ( like the new dock and icon set ), but in the end, none of that matters to me personally as much as the ability to do things as close to instantly as possible, while working for money, at least.

@scottalanmiller said:

I have you beat. My $150 Acer Chromebook that is years old is better than the just purchased MacBook Pro

This whole conversation is especially hilarious to me, because when I stumbled upon that SMB Journal site I was like "Sweet! Someone that's actually extremely good and passionate at their job and that has just schooled me on a handful of important RAID considerations" ( I read like 7 articles on it the first night ).

And then... when you had me join Mango, and I stumbled onto the "what's your desk like" thread... and saw that you worked off of just a MacBook Pro... my jaw hit the floor. And I was like "WTF?!?!, how is that possible?" Now I know the real story LOL.

@dafyre said:

I doubt you are the only one. I find that the latest version of OS X (Yosemite?) and the one bfore it is basically unusable for me. Everything is just dirt slow (even on a 21" iMac from 2014). It adds extra characters to files when you access them over a windows share, and a host of other issues.

I have Said iMac sitting on my desk next to me... Running Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, lol.

That's hilarious. I may not be the only one, but I'm the only developer out of 20 or so that I've talked to about it that notices it.

@thecreativeone91 said:

The problem is Apple is trying to do too much. in the PowerPC days things were simple they focused on one market. Now they are trying to get everyone and doing none of it well. I also think they should decided if they want to be a software company or a hardware. If they want to keep making OS 10 do it, then charge a small amount for it and let it run on any computer, forget about the hardware - which in recent years hasn't been to great. And make the software a lot better.

Totally disagree here. Their hardware is what IS great(ish), their software is what's terrible. Everything from the handicapped mouse acceleration curve, to their core mechanisms for windows placement and resizing, to their omnipresent top strip to represent application focus, to their implementation of "cut", and how they selectively withhold transferring focus to system dialogs in certain situations such that you have to hop in your mouse ( and they make the world's worst mouses, btw ) and drive across town to dismiss a dialog. I could literally go on for hours but there are just endless, endless software design decisions that slow you down on a minutely basis compared to Windows.

I'd tried literally 5 different 4k monitors before I got to the retina iMac, and couldn't use any of them for work because of performance. It's the first one that actually manages 60Hz at a crisp and readable size, and for that reason I love it ( running Windows ). Their laptops, phones, and tablets are also typically well-made from a hardware perspective, IMO.

@scottalanmiller said:

That's what convinced me to give one a try. It's not bad, but it's not good. Certainly not on par with Windows or Linux systems that I use for a fraction of the price. Last week I asked my office to replace mine with a $250 Chromebook as I'd be more productive. $5,000 isn't as useful as $250!!

It's so funny that you say that!!!!! I have an Acer Chromebook that was $160, and it blows the 15" Retina MacBook Pro away for web browsing. The scrolling and rendering performance is so much better that I almost made a video for YouTube. God it's such a relief to hear someone else say these things aloud.

@scottalanmiller said:

@creayt said:

I don't remember macs ever being fast. I remember them false advertising themselves as fast, like with their "The world's most powerful personal computer" campaign w/ Jeff Goldblum that they had to stop airing because it was deemed preposterously false ( was a 2 CPU desktop that would lose in benchmarks to a single CPU, low-end Windows box ).

OMG, I remember those days. They were so outrageous. It was so trivial to get stuff SO much faster for half the price - even for running Mac OS let alone running "anything." That was a lot for why I've avoided Macs so much, I feel a bit embarrassed using them as people might think I fell for the outrageous claims.

Everywhere I look I see developers using them, and honestly I just don't get it. They make me feel about 40% as productive as I otherwise do, and using Windows on a MacBook Pro makes keyboard shortcuts feel slower and more awkward to me, which also feels like a dramatic productivity hit. I've tried switching for primary use about 10 times, but in the end always retreat, including a 6 month stint where I used OS X for web development. I have no idea how people do it. I notice the delay between when I'm typing and when the letters render on the screen even, which makes my blood boil.

@scottalanmiller said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@creayt said:

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt said:

Awesome, I'll check it out. It'd be amazing to Raid 0 that sh.

lol damn rights it would. You'd probably see little benefit but massive props if you do it anyway XD

I'm the asshole that thinks OS X is too sprinkled w/ latency to use for web development. I notice that command + tab has a slight, imperceptible to some people, delay before it fades onto the screen when compared w/ Windows' alt + tab on the same machine. I wouldn't be shocked if I did feel some benefit

I'm a Mac user and find EVERYTHING to have an annoying amount of delay. I have the top end, brand new MacBook Pro and find it sluggish and problematic.

It didn't used to be that way.. apple has thrown away their base and primary market to make everything more consumerish and the OS and apps (final cut pro) suffered a lot. There's a lot of things that feel too much like iOS on it now. Sad thing is Mircosoft is doing a better job of a unified OS/ecosystem... That shouldn't be happening. Mac OS used to be much more lightweight.

That's how I remember it, long ago. Now I've got this crazy laptop, loaded with the fastest hardware ever and it feels no faster than my dc5850 Windows 8.1 desktop.

I don't remember macs ever being fast. I remember them false advertising themselves as fast, like with their "The world's most powerful personal computer" campaign w/ Jeff Goldblum that they had to stop airing because it was deemed preposterously false ( was a 2 CPU desktop that would lose in benchmarks to a single CPU, low-end Windows box ).

In fact I remember when I first started using computers, it was circa 2003 I think, and I'd ordered some generic, cobbled together AMD Athlon box off of some auction site because it was all I could afford, I think it was around $400, which for that day and age was extremmmmely cheap. I used it for a few weeks at home, and then school started and I enrolled in some graphic design and animation classes... When I got to their brand-new iMacs they were so slow by comparison that I figured something must be wrong with mine ( until I switch 3 or 4 times to other seats and they were all the same ). Even things like Photoshop were exponentially slower, and I found myself waiting on the interface so much that it was pretty instantly frustrating. Then I'd hear my graphic design teacher say things like "Macs are better for web design and development, they just are", and when I'd challenge her ( out of sincerity, I wanted to know why ) she'd never have any actual information to back up her claims, just that "it's generally accepted that they are." So for my main project in that class I made a video showing me doing identical work much, much faster on my $400 brandless windows box side-by-side w/ their "brand new", exorbitantly expensive iMacs. The class was laughing almost the entire time, at one point I showed how in the time it took to launch some video editing suite on the iMac I was able to launch it on my box literally 6 times, and this was on an entry level 7200RPM drive ( before the SSD days ). I like a lot of things about Macs, but I've never used one I thought was fast ( with the exception of while in Boot Camp, most of them get pretty zippy if you throw Windows onto them ). I think it's just that Microsoft has heavily invested in performance engineering and Apple hasn't, because clearly they can get by without it. If they made Macs with Windows keyboards I'd buy them every time though, a lot of their hardware is more attractive than any Windows hardware I see. I don't think their designs are that amazing, and they make some awkward color choices, like the face that my 2014 retina iMac is aluminum and black and then the keyboard has clashingly white keys. But still. Windows designs, even when they're good like the new XPS 13, are still, most of the time, ruined by stupid decisions ( like the ugly texture/pattern they put on the XPS 13's body ).

@scottalanmiller said:

20% is a lot, but not crazy overkill. I might taper that back to 15% myself. But if that gives you enough capacity for your needs, go for it.

Sounds good to me. And I believe the RAID controller supports online modification so I could theoretically add another 4 1TB drives to the 10 later if/when I need it. Thanks for your help, much appreciated.

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt I spent several hours creating the fastest core XP install I possibly could for similar reasons. Granted that was for dual WD Raptor 150GB 10krpm drives that you could hear with headphones on. Ahhh good times

Epic.

@scottalanmiller said:

@creayt said:

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt said:

Awesome, I'll check it out. It'd be amazing to Raid 0 that sh.

lol damn rights it would. You'd probably see little benefit but massive props if you do it anyway XD

I'm the asshole that thinks OS X is too sprinkled w/ latency to use for web development. I notice that command + tab has a slight, imperceptible to some people, delay before it fades onto the screen when compared w/ Windows' alt + tab on the same machine. I wouldn't be shocked if I did feel some benefit

I'm a Mac user and find EVERYTHING to have an annoying amount of delay. I have the top end, brand new MacBook Pro and find it sluggish and problematic.

So refereshing to hear someone besides me say that. My theory is that it has to do w/ OS X being some kind of secondary presentation layer OS that sits over Unix and does a crapload of translations from underlying Unix events to OS X. There's even a delay in right clicking half the time. Whatever the cause actually is, it's annoying and I just cannot feel comfortable writing code on OS X. Don't get me started on the laundry list of abominable usability decisions. I like OS X for web browsing ( as long as I don't need to browse too many tabs at once ) and love the text aliasing for the most part, for most fonts preferring it to Windows, but productivity man, productivity. It is interesting to see how much faster the same computer becomes when you throw Boot Camp onto it.

*Written from a retina iMac running Windows 8.

I actually returned a top-of-the-line 15.4" retina MacBook Pro two nights ago because I realized I had no use for it, at all. Somehow the 13" 2015 one feels faster than it even with just a dual core. The PCIe SSD uses 4 lanes apparently so it gets 1300/1300, which is my only guess as to how it manages that.

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt said:

Awesome, I'll check it out. It'd be amazing to Raid 0 that sh.

lol damn rights it would. You'd probably see little benefit but massive props if you do it anyway XD

I'm the asshole that thinks OS X is too sprinkled w/ latency to use for web development. I notice that command + tab has a slight, imperceptible to some people, delay before it fades onto the screen when compared w/ Windows' alt + tab on the same machine. I wouldn't be shocked if I did feel some benefit

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt Yeah it should be compatible, you can buy them on eBay IIRC. Nifty battery "slice" things can go in there too.

Awesome, I'll check it out. It'd be amazing to Raid 0 that sh.