Another step of hot-rodding my G5: achieving modern-levels of storage performance.
With 6 SSDs I managed to achieve an average of 750MB/s read performance and 350MB/s write performance, faster than the trashcan Mac Pro for reads.
My initial assumption was right. One should be able to get 1GB/s of read performance on a G5. However, I need the Quadro to be able to drive the 4K display so I can't occupy a 3rd PCIe slot with storage. Linux performs much better than Mac OS, softRAID-wise.
This setup is not practical, since the two onboard SATA disks are part of the array and I will need to use them to act as boot loaders before calling either Linux or Mac OS X. For this test, I booted the computer via FW400.
An interesting observation: the soft RAID algorithm seems to do round robin writes and all-at-once reads. That's why the performance varies. Sometimes data is written to SATA III over PCIe disks, and sometimes to the SATA I bus. I somehow hoped it would write to all disks at once, so is life.
Next month, I should be able to get my setup done to run the "T221" at 41Hz and the final storage arrangement. I'm also writing some scripts to automatically change the scaling on Mac OS depending on the application. It would call TenFourFox without scaling and zoom 200%, but would call TextEdit at 2x scaling, for example.
So far the idea is to use:
2x Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital connected to the Quadro driving the ViewSonic at 3840x2400 @ 41 Hz.
2x SATA II SSDs connected to the SATA I buses as boot loaders, calling the 4x SATA III SSDs connected to the PCIe controllers. I'm not sure whether I'm going to use RAID0 or RAID1.
A NAS connected via Gigabit Ethernet for storage and backups.
System backup to a external drive connected via FireWire.
What do you think?
