Recently our offices have seen an infusion of new computers.  The cool computer to have these days seems to be the 8-core Mac Pro.

I took a decidedly different route to get to computer bliss as my recent post describes.  Today, I am proud to announce that the next step in my master plan is complete.

I just added 4, 73GB, 15,000RPM SAS Drives to my already fast machine.  These drives are running in a RAID5 on an Adaptec 3405 SAS controller.  I am seeing about 500 MB/s reads and writes.

I have moved my main Development machine off the 500GB drive, and onto the 200GB Array.  The load times are phenomenal, taking a snapshot in VMware is now a matter of 1-5 seconds, and the system feels unbelievably responsive.

The biggest concern that I had going into it was the noise of these monster drives.  I was amazed at how quiet they really are, aside from an occasional seek, I don’t hear them at all.

My overall feeling is that unless you are doing insane amounts of CPU intense tasks, looking for little green men for example, my route delivers a much better computer for your buck.