Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, April 4, 2008:
New Computer Setup
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As usual I haven’t posted in a while. Since it’s Friday I’m not in the mood for anything too heavy so I thought I’d post about my new computer setup. So far it’s been amazingly productive for me.
First a little history.
The first setup I had when I started UserScape was a Apple G5 Tower with a couple gigs of ram (some may recall how a bad drive almost ended UserScape before it began). This setup had 2 Samsung 17” monitors.
That was OK for a while, but I got tired of being stuck in one location all day. So then I moved to a MacBook Pro, 3GB ram. I also purchased an Apple Cinema 23” display along the way for when I worked at the desk. That’s what I’ve been using up until last month, but the truth is I’m mostly at my desk these days. When I’m not at the desk I’m only doing coding, never really support or other business that requires the horsepower of the MB pro.
Given all this I decided to move to a high end desktop and a new laptop optimized for portability.
The new desktop setup is an Apple Mac Pro tower with 16GB ram (cheap from www.macsales.com), 3 hard drives (more in a moment on that), the same 23” Apple Cinema display as before. For portable computing I got a MacBook Air.
So far this setup is fantastic!!!
The desktop is great as I can easily run multiple VM setups for different Windows/Linux installations, Photoshop, BBEdit with 8 million documents open, multiple browsers with dozens of tabs and all without the system showing any signs at all of being loaded down. I’m also one of these people who never turns their computer off and so far the Mac Pro hasn’t broke a sweat.
The MacBook Air (MBA) is turning out to be the perfect compliment to this setup. It seems that I’m the ideal candidate for the MBA. It could never be a primary computer for a serious business person, but it’s a great second computer. It’s insanely light, powerful enough for coding PHP applications, and handles a single browser with many tabs no problem. I don’t bother with any VM’s or heavy apps like Photoshop on it since all that is on the Mac Pro. I couldn’t be happier with this little sucker. Battery life also seems very good so far and the screen is great.
As the link above indicates I’ve learned my backup lessons the hard way. So the Mac Pro is setup with 2 350 Gb drives in RAID 1 for mirroring. If one fails the other has all the data. I have a 3rd 750GB drive being used as a Time Machine backup drive for versioned backups of all the files on the raid disk. I also have an external hard drive which I use with Super Duper so that I always have a bootable version of the raid disk available.
I’m also using Jungle Disk to backup selected items to Amazon Web Services which is working out great. I haven’t cleared out my account from the backups of the MacBook Pro yet so up there I basically have duplicates of everything. With 50GB+ of data up there and lots of requests for the initial upload my bill was $30!!
Overall, if you have some money to spend on your computer setup I can’t imagine a better setup than this. My productivity has dramatically increased with the Mac Pro (and full time use of the big monitor).
Discussion
Sounds like a sweet setup-I'm building a similar Mac Pro configuration myself.
Isn't RAID 0 to increase performance at the expense of data security though? I thought RAID 1 was the initial RAID level for mirroring data.
Created by Chris on 04.04.2008 11:03 am
Hi, Ian -
I'm hoping / assuming you really meant "RAID 1" and not "RAID 0" - RAID 1 is mirroring for full redundancy, while RAID 0 is striping for adding capacity & performance but no redundancy.
Sounds like a killer setup!
Jack
Created by Jack Johnson on 04.04.2008 11:06 am
Yep, that was a typo. Thanks!
Created by Ian on 04.04.2008 11:07 am
Ian,
I was working on a 23" Cinema for the last 4 years and loved it. I recently decided that I still needed more room, and moved to a 30". I went with a Dell 3007 WFP-HC, which was on sale for $1199, and I know you can frequently get them on eBay for 800 - 1000. Or, the Apple Cinemas are nice too, and if you go through the Apple Store's refurb section, you can get them for $1499 I believe.
It's amazing how much more room this 30" has. I use it at my work and can see a lot more at a time, and it really helps. At home, my 24" iMac suffices, as I don't spend the majority of my time developing at home any more 
Created by Bado on 04.04.2008 11:43 am
"I’m also one of these people who never turns their computer off"
I'm disappointed to hear this. Surely you can hibernate it overnight or something? Just leaving it on is such an unnecessary waste of resources....
Created by Edward on 04.04.2008 11:52 am
I tried a 24" HP and it was horrible. I spent half a day trying to configure it thinking something must be wrong for it to look that bad, but it really was that bad! So back to the Apple I went.
I don't know about 30, I might have to sit too far away. I don't really want to feel like my head is being irradiated 
It does sleep on it's own Ed I just don't totally power it off.
Created by Ian on 04.04.2008 12:30 pm
Actually the Dell 30 is perfect. No issues. Color is as good as my Apple Cinema 23" was. Angles are all fine.
I don't have to sit further back. The resolution is more, obviously but everything is scaled so appears the same size as the 23". It's just that there's more room now
Created by Bado on 04.04.2008 2:19 pm
I won't lie Ian, I'm jealous. That's a very sweet setup.
Created by Leslie on 04.04.2008 4:22 pm
Nice setup - One thing though.. where's the pics! :p
Created by Matthew on 04.04.2008 5:00 pm
Leslie, tell Rick to hook you up!
Good point Matthew, let me get some up here. Will do shortly.
Created by Ian on 04.04.2008 7:04 pm
Jealous! Mah! And here I was all proud of my dual-headed MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM. :(
Created by Brian Manley on 04.06.2008 12:24 am
Well that's nothing to sneeze at Brian!
Created by Ian on 04.06.2008 8:04 am
Hi. Great setup. I just upgraded to a MacPro with 1.5Tb of storage and a 30'' Apple Cinema, although I only went with 6Gb RAM (fine so far for a couple of VM's and my Mac apps). Loving It ! Here's a link with a screenshot of the big 30 http://stevechol.livejournal.com/77415.html
Cheers - Steve
Created by Steve Cholerton on 04.07.2008 6:46 am
Nice Steve. It's really a ridiculous amount of room
Created by Ian on 04.07.2008 11:07 am
I like the most your keyboard
Created by Tamiya on 04.19.2008 4:59 am