My rendering of the Accelsior; where do you live Photoshop?

When I upgraded to the Nikon D800, I was a bit concerned that processing 36 MP files would overtask my somewhat aging 2008 Mac Pro.   I certainly did not want to invest in a new computer on top of a camera, although that is a very real consideration these days.  Although expensive, Mac Pro’s (like many desktops) can be expanded greatly.  But how much life can I squeak out of mine?  I have already added memory (20 GB) and hard drives, even an eSATA port due to the ability to accept PCI expansion cards.   I use this constantly for cloning my internal drives to externals.

My Mac Pro is primarily my digital darkroom.   Four years later since my switch to Mac, it is still running like a dream, with the exception of running some Photoshop plugins that tend to make it crawl, like multiple stacks of filters in Nik’s Color Efex Pro.   This is after a couple OS upgrades, numerous software upgrades, and needing to process larger and larger files.   The next major step would be to start replacing my traditional hard drives with SSD hard drives.   There is still some upgrade room left in this heavy beast.   I won’t be ready to part with it until there is new critical software that will no longer run on it.

I began looking at SSD as this was the next logical step, and came across OWC’s creative version of an SSD, that resides in one of your PCI expansion slots instead of taking up a hard drive bay.   It is called the OWC Mercury Accelsior.   It is a bit more expensive than a normal SSD, but it offers the benefits of expandability (you can upgrade the chips on it), it is significantly faster than SSDs that sit in your hard drive bays, and it leaves me with 4 drive bays open for expansion.   So I went this route.

I received it the other day, and installed it into my Mac today.   Upon booting, OSX immediately recognized a new drive installed, but stated it couldn’t read it.  No problem, I went to Disk Utility to format it as a new Mac drive.   I then used Super Duper to clone my current boot hard drive to the Accelsior.   That wasn’t a very fast process as I am still reading from a slow hard drive.  Then came the ultimate test; set the Accelsior as a the startup hard drive and reboot.

Well, my Mac rebooted…sort of.   At first it just sat at the initial Apple logo screen with a spinning activity icon.   Much longer than normal.  I rebooted, and it proceeded to the login page, but now it was giving me problems there.  After typing in my password, I just got a spinning beach ball.   At this point I was wondering what the hell!   I popped on the internet and read some people having problems depending on the PCI slot it was installed in.   I installed it in the 16X slot as the instructions that came with it said 8x or 16x preferred.   Well, I popped it out and moved it to a 4X slot just to see what would happen.   My Mac booted right up, pretty fast.   I don’t know what is up with that, but I plan to ask OWC if they know.   I believe even the 4X slot is capable of handling all the card can do, but I will have to check further.

So after the initial hiccup, all seems well.   Photoshop and Lightroom load tremendously faster.   There is no hesitation whatsoever in scrolling through my 40k image catalog in Lightroom.   Every program I have tried loads much like it would on an iPad or similar solid state device.  My computer is also quieter as I am not listening to the hard drive access all the time.  However, my Nik Color Efex filter test still has the jury out there.  It didn’t move very fast, and it may simply be a function of processing power, which I suspect.

So far so good in this next installment of my Mac Pro upgrades. It is running great, and I wonder how more many years I can squeak out of this thing!   When 1 TB becomes affordable in SSD, my internal hard drives are probably the next to go.

EDIT UPDATE 16Nov2012: Well, my hopes for this new drive came to an end this week.   I had my computer off for a few days, booted up, and my Mac would not recognize the Accelsior.  I rebooted again, and it found an unrecognizeable drive with a capacity of only 33KB.   I rebooted again, changed slots, tried a variety of things but no luck.  So it is going back to OWC.  Maybe I had a lemon, but I just can’t afford to be second guessing if the thing is going to work day to day.   Looks like I will be checking out traditional SSD routes.