Upgrading macs

Jason Ramsey

Jason Ramsey

Admin
Having a bit of a hard time finding info on this as I am not a mac user. Can someone point me in a direction where I can find out about upgradeability of macs. In particular if I want to add hdd's do I have to use a specific drive that is compatible with macs or can I just use any drive I would otherwise us in a pc?
Thanks
Jason
 
What kind of Mac are you talking about? Most of the time, HDDs are compatible in both. Video cards, RAM, etc, will have to be Mac-specific.
 
Mac pro. if i go that mac instead of the pc route.
Jason
*Thanks. mainly worried about hdd. but vid cards have to be specific though huh?
thanks
 
Yep, vid cards are either for Mac or PC...unless someone decides to come out with a universal one now that the Macs are using Intel processors.

I've got a two-year old G5 tower. I got online and found the cheapest Hitachi/IBM 250GB drive I could. Snapped it in and restarted...haven't had a hitch. I heard the new MacPros make it even easier to install HDDs.
 
Thanks for the info. I dont' know that i will go the mac route for one reason mainly (which i won't go into on this thread) but everything else about fcs is attractive. Good to know I can save some money on getting hdd's from somehwere else.
Jason
 
The new Mac Pro supports sATA drives that require no screws to install, you just open the side of the housing, and slide that bad boy in there. We just bought a 500gb sATA for our Mac Tower here at the office for around 150 if i recall. THe new Mac Pro supports up to 4 internal sATA hard drives. Easily upgradable, get 4 750gb and have a 3terabyte station. Thatd be sweet. THe ram is not MAC or PC ram, its just recommended ram. Any ram that meets the specs will work, you dont need MAC ram or PC ram. theres no such thing, it just has to meet the spec requirments.
 
Ok, thanks. Do you think a 10k rpm drive is recommended editing multiple streams of dvcpro hd for real-time? Does this differ from a mac setup to a pc setup nle? It has been suggested quite well to me, that the 10k drives will really help when it comes to real-time functionality. And just having larg external drives for backup/archiving/storage, etc.
Jason
 
My SATA drive is 7500, and I've been doing 100mb/s video with no glitches. The only drive that I've ever had fail was a 10k Seagate.

Cynic's right...RAM is RAM...as long as it matches the specs.
 
Youll be fine with 7200rpm drives , ive been editing with alot of effects and multiple streams off of my internal 5400rpm drive on my Macbook Pro before with no problems with dropped frames or real time rendering and what not. The Mac Pro is a very wise decision. Remember, its also a PC, so if for some reason you decide that FCS isnt for you, you can boot to something else on the PC side.


Cant do that if you dont like the choice of buying a PC. You are stuck and cant boot the other way.
 
Yeah, I don't think I am worried about deciding if fcs would be right for me. i am waiting for it to be though. In that regard I have considered spending an extra 1500 on a not quite so hossed up mac pro setup incase FCS becomes something I might want to go to in the future. In that regard can I have a windows os and a mac os installed on the same comp? Where (like with pcs) I can have multiple os's installed and choose which one I want to boot when I start up?
Thanks
Jason
 
Yes, on the new Intel based macs, you can have Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista installed on the same computer and when booting up you can decide which one you want to boot into.

Im running the new Public Beta Vista on my Macbook Pro right now and based on MS's rating system of 1 to 5, i got a 4.1 for my "Performance" rating, im positive any newer mac , especially a Mac Pro or new iMac Core 2 Duo would easily be a 4.5 or higher. It is probably the most equipped PC on the market value wise.

Anyways, you can also run parralells and have Windows and Mac OS X running at the same time as well. Using paralells, i run Windows 2000 for testing purposes while im in my Mac OS X. Its pretty neato!
 
Ya, of course, you can use Vista instead of XP, i was running XP on it before for months, but i needed to try out Vista for testing reasons with our software we make here at my office. But yes, XP ran better than any PC we have here at the office on it. Got amazing results from some games too like condemned and quake 4 ;) hehe.

But yes, and its also future proof being able to run Vista nativley, no emulation.
 
No problemo~ thats what we are here for, and im sure you can help as well and the cycle continues!

Ill stay posted to this thread in case you have anymore questions and hopefully others can join in on the help! :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top