I have decided to document my upgrade to Lion on my Mac Pro 1,1. First of all I must say that I am quite happy with my computer. It's about 5 years old and is the best investment ever. The cost at purchase was about 5k and frankly it has LASTED. Which is really unheard of for a PC. I have had one HDD failure and that has been the only hardware issue. I started with 4 GB of RAM and have upgraded to 8GB. 2 Dual Core Xeon processors are still kicking today. I do not do a log of gaming or video editing so they rock for me.
So anyway I want to upgrade to Lion. In my eyes I still have plenty of RAM. If I need to I can get all the way up to 64 GB, but I doubt I will have the need for that. My biggest bottle necks in performance is the disk IO and graphics. With Lion's emphasis on animations I am going to try and get the Sapphire Radeon 4870 I bought a while back to work again. I never got it to work in SL, but I am hoping Lion may support it. Addressing the disk io there is really only adding an SSD drive. I have discovered that my onboard SATA controller only supports 3gb/sec transfer rates, so there is no point in getting a 6gb/sec drive. I also think I will only use it for a boot drive, but what size to get ? I need to know how much space Lion takes up and account for that plus the swap file to get maximum OS performance. I would get my home directory on my spindles, but what about the Applications dir ? That is by far my largest directory outside of home. Should I get a ssd drive big enough for both the OS and the Applications ? or should I move applications to the spindles ? Does the OS even support moving around these system directories ? Here is my current boot drive layout:
/System : 4.98 GB
/Library : 148.8 GB
/Applications : 41.04 GB
/Users : 804.54 GB
/Developer : 10.36 GB
/opt : 16.64 GB
Plus I have 102.01 GB of data on the 500 GB drive that the SSD would replace. Gotta say I wonder if the speed is worth the drop in size.
Well I am off to do some research as I need to know what besides /System HAS to be on the boot volume. This will determine the size (and cost) of the SSD I would have to get.
UPDATE: I have decided to get the Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2CCA 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive. I feel this is the fastest drive in my price range. At only 128GB though I am not willing to replace one of my 500 GB drives. So I'm going to stick in my lower optical bay and lose a Super Drive. This will allow me to stripe my remaining drives and use it as a 2 TB volume. I'll post more as I accomplish my goals.
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