I agree that the first choice is overkill. That said, the obvious advantage
of any tower is expandability. You could, for example, load it up with
additional hard drives and turn them into a RAID array, or simply use an
additional drive as a Time Machine backup for the primary drive and keep all
of the work local to the machine. No server required for backup.
We went with option #2, though with a smaller screen since we literally
could not fit the larger models in the small space the arts lab is in. You
could consider formatting the 2TB drive into two or more partitions. One
partition for the OS and applications, and a second for data. This makes it
easier to reimage if necessary. You could also use a partition as a time
machine backup, but this has some risk if the hard drive itself physically
fails. I do this with my laptop, but then I backup the time machine
partition to the cloud via Crash Plan.
I have found the performance of these computers to be excellent for
Photoshop, Final Cut Express, GarageBand, and similar CPU intensive
operations. On a final note, while we have not done this, there should be
ways to turn these machines into rendering farms for extremely large video
projects to render overnight, thereby gaining productive use of them during
otherwise idle times.
Regards,
s
-----
Steve Taffee | Director of Strategic Projects
Castilleja School | staffee@castilleja.org
1310 Bryant Street | www.castilleja.org
Palo Alto, CA 94301 | taffee.edublogs.org
650.924.1040 (Google Voice)
Women Learning, Women Leading
<http://twitter.com/sjtaffee> <http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetaffee>
You don't *really* need to print this do you?
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Patricia Moser <moserp@sidwell.edu> wrote:
> Friends,
>
> I am seeking recommendations for the best computers for an upper school
> digital visual arts lab, specifically brands and models. The lab will be
> used for all sorts of digital art, including AP Art, art portfolios, digital
> photography, and music. Specific models that have been recommended to us
> are:
> First choice which seems a bit over the top: the 8 Core Mac Pro Two 2.26GHz
> Quad-Core Intel Xeon16GB (8x2GB)
>
> Second choice: Quad-Core iMac 27-inch: 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 +200
> 16GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB +1400 2TB Serial ATA Drive
>
> Third Choice: Quad-Core iMac 27-inch: 2.66GHz 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core
> i7 +200 8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB +600 1TB Serial ATA Drive
>
> Is anyone out there using any of these? How is their performance? Anything
> else you would recommend? What is the best way to handle storage of the
> large files that will be created? A separate server? Thanks for your help.
>
> Patt Moser
> Sidwell Friends School
>
>
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