The new Mac Pro’s Achilles heel
With an extra 4 gigabytes of memory and two 500 gigabyte Seagate Barracuda hard drive successfully installed in my new Mac Pro, I fired up the benchmark programs to see if the upgrades have boosted performance.
First I ran GeekBench. I saw very little difference in the scores but for one of the memory tests, “Stdlib Write,” which increased from 2128 to 3689. It appears having 4 sticks of memory installed does aid performance.
Then I ran XBench, which includes a hard disk test. More to the point, it allows you to test any installed hard drive, not just the boot drive. To my surprise, the new drive bested the Apple-supplied drive by about 33 percent – with a score of 70.38 versus 52.80.
I’m pretty sure this is not a fluke, either. When Macworld magazine posted its initial tests of the same stock 2.8 GHz Mac Pro that I have, the hard drive was the weakest link:
“The eight-core 2.8GHz system lagged in some of our tests,” wrote James Galbraith, “results we attribute to its somewhat sluggish Seagate hard drive.”
The Macworld folks went further, swapping out a Western Digital drive from the previous generation 2.66Ghz Mac Pro. The swap slowed multitasking performance on the older machine by 14 percent while speeding up performance on the newer Mac Pro by 31 percent.
Just for kicks I ran XBench on my Mac at work, a dual 2.5GHz G5 Power Mac from mid-2004. The G5 scored 69.72 on the disk test, just a hair under the score for my 500 GB drives.
All of which raises the rather uncomfortable question: why did Apple put a subpar drive in such a premium machine? Almost everything else about the Mac Pro screams: its Quad-core Xeon CPUs, its 800 MHz memory, its PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots, its overall system architecture. Why skimp on one of the most critical components?
It can’t be the expense. The 500 GB Seagates I purchased from Other World Computing cost only $150 apiece. For the tiny nibble it would have taken from its huge profit margin on the Mac Pro – what are we talking about here, $20 $30? -- Apple could have included a better-performing 320 GB drive.
For that matter, Apple could put a better graphics card in the stock configuration. Many Mac Pro buyers are shelling out the extra $200 for the acclaimed NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. In the previous configuration, many paid extra for the Radeon X1900 because it was so much better than the default card. Why can’t the stock configuration have a card that’s somewhere in between?
And while I’m ranting: why does Apple charge so much for additional memory? Veteran Mac users have long known this, but does anyone know why they do it?
Had I ordered just an extra 2 GB of RAM from Apple, it would have cost an extra $500. The 4 GB kit I ordered from OWC cost just $200. That’s twice as much memory for less than half the cost. (For the morbidly curious, ordering a Mac Pro fully loaded with 32 GB of RAM costs an extra $9,100; a 32 GB kit from OWC will set you back just $2,900.)
Don’t get me wrong. I love my Mac Pro. It’s wicked fast and whisper-quiet, an awesome piece of hardware. But if you’re going to sell a premium machine, sell a premium machine -- $2,800 is not chump change in the PC market.
Sigh.
in Mac Pro
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Comments
My guess would be heat issues. I had a friend who was an early adopter of the 10,000 RPM drives and was always having overheating issues.
Posted by: bryanintimonium | January 25, 2008 11:49 AM
I guess that the old rule about not buying RAM from Apple now also applies to hard drives. Just get the cheapest stock drive and buy any additional drives yourself.
Posted by: MattMan | January 25, 2008 12:33 PM
Your comments on how you tested disk swaps (and how Macworld did too) are so sketchy as to be useless.
Were the drives the boot drives, or not? Was the test run on a clean install of the OS? What other processes, if any, were running? Were there multiple drives? If so, which was the boot drive? Which was the bus master?
There are lots of variables, only one of which is the speed of the drive. I'm not convinced your test methodology is up to snuff.
That said, I don't dispute the cost-saving motive on Apple's part. There is always motivation to cut manufacturing cost on a product.
There's no doubt Apple is capable of building a Rolls-Royce in the Mac Pro product line. Ignoring their unusually high memory prices, would everyone pay twice the price for a better Mac Pro? Perhaps Apple determined that the majority of Mac Pro customers want "very good" but won't pay for "unbelievable."
You and I and others may want a super system, but Apple is selling to the mass consumer market. In that market, price is very important. Be glad we can customize our systems for our needs.
Posted by: Rick Auricchio | January 25, 2008 1:02 PM
The 500GB drives David is referring to are not 10,000 RPM. Even among 7,200RPM drives there is a range of performances available - and the 320GB that Apple chose is indeed very slow. I ordered mine with the 500GB with has received kudos in other Apple hardware (knock on wood it's the same one!). And just to make sure I ordered a Hitachi 7K1000 750GB boot drive for under $200 delivered. That particular drive, along with its 32MB disk cache is rated among the fastest drives you can buy - even faster than 10,000 RPM drives in most indices! And one more note, TransIntl. memory is even cheaper than OWC. And it has the Apple-rated heat sink. Cheers!
Posted by: hardchemist | January 25, 2008 1:44 PM
The new Mac Pro carries on the terribly embarrassing tradition of its predecessors at the top of the Mac totem pole by including bargain basement video cards and hard drives so small that many $600 PCs come with more storage. Apple, however, knows that many Pro buyers work in 2D and would therefore never notice a faster card. They also know that most Pro buyers wouldn’t store anything important on a single internal boot drive. If it’s big enough for the OS and applications that’s good enough. Thus they can get away with two cheap components because most will use RAID for storage and upgrade the video card (fortunately only $200 this time) if they need to. They can also get away without including an AirPort card because Mac Pros typically get wired into a spot and never move until they’re replaced.
Apple is a highly profitable business and part of that success comes from knowing what it can get away with.
Posted by: David | January 25, 2008 7:35 PM
This comment is directed to hardchemist's comments about the slow hard drive in the standard new Mac Pro set up.
Was the Hitachi 7K1000 750GB hard drive purchased through the Apple Stores CTO configuration program?
Posted by: Stuart J. Holt | January 25, 2008 7:57 PM
I had the same experience. I bought the 2.8GHz 8-core with the 320GB drive and immediately added 3 Samsung 1TB 7200 RPM drives. My test results are identical to David Zeiler's: 33% increase in maximum, minimum, and average data transfer rates on the Samsung drives. These cost more than some other 1TB drives, but I decided to get them because they scored well in several benchmarks on Tom's Hardware Guide and didn't get too hot. I actually bought four of these drives, but the fourth was DOA. Thanks to David, Macworld, and Tom's Hardware for this significant performance boost!
Posted by: Alexander McLellan | January 25, 2008 9:17 PM