New Mac configurations for Firewire scanners?

[Dante_Stella]

Hi -

I have a 2006 Mac Pro that is sputtering along (even with an SSD and 16Gb of RAM, it could never be made to do Mountain Lion (let alone Yosemite), has no ability to use USB 3.0, and can't be connected to faster Thunderbolt storage options). This might not be so bad if it weren't also for the fact that it takes 10 seconds to render an M240 file on LR (let's not talk about 400Mb negative scans…).

So if I need to keep two Firewire scanners going, what's the best option? I've been running these in XP in Boot Camp, but it doesn't seem like that would be an option on a newer Mac.

- Anyone know the latest Mac Mini that can run 10.4 or XP?
- Is there a cheap windows box (like a Mac Mini) that has 1394 and can run XP?
- Is there any virtualization software that can use Firewire? So far, it doesn't seem to work with Virtualbox or VM Fusion 7.
- Are there any good RAID storange solutions for storing 4-5Tb of images? I have multiple internal drives on my Mac Pro, and don't like the idea of a separate box for storage, but that seems to be de rigeur these days.
- Does Windows 7's virtualization of XP allow the use of Firewire devices?

The ideal solution would be to use XP and Silverfast 6.5 because it is ace at finding frames on medium-format film (much more than the Mac version or SF 8 is). But XP is difficult to license these days - and it is a real pain to install.

Thanks,
Dante

 

[Aristophanes]

2013 Mac mini should do it for you. Has FW and USB 3 and TB.

I would not use RAID. I'd use a separate box for sure. OWC TB are very good.

2 scanners may be an issue. OWC has a multi-prot box for that. Costly.

Can you use Vuescan or TWAIN and stay MacOS all the way?

I think the market has moved beyond virtualization.

 

[Merlijn53]

The oldest system you can use with a mac, is the system it originally came with, so no 10.4 on a new mac mini.
There are adapters from thunderbolt to firewire, so you can connect your scanners to a new mac. If it's not an Imacon, you can use Vuescan use you scanner. It works great.
There are several raid systems to use with thunderbolt or usb 3. Just have a look at the Apple store. They also have the firewire adapters.
Frank

 

[tsiklonaut]

I'd say just get a newer Mac Pro - it holds performance over much longer period of time. Being the bottom-end product the Mac Mini will outdate so fast it's unbelieavable (I had one, probably never again).

Since the newest Mac Pro 6,1 is still at ripoff prices you can grab a s/h Mac Pro 5,1 (Mid 2010) very cheap these days - aim to 6- or 12-core versions with a decent graphic card, sufficent memory and pro-grade SSD. Run a BootCamp if you need to.

All for a bargain for what it offers IMO. It has FW800 ports & you can use FW400->800 adapter that costs next to nothing or just buy a dedicated FW800->400 cable, I use one without any issues or fuss at all. Photoshop sings well with my 6-core (12 usable threads) Xeons, 20GB memory - I work with over 500MB files, with layers they can exceed 1GB each and I can have some 3-5 openened of them parallel for comparison editing in one session without any signs the machine is slowing down, with Mac Mini I struggled already with a singe 100-200MB file. With Mac Pro case a big advantage is also having option for a decent graphics card(*) with Open GL support.

(*) I.e. I saved some 200€ with a GTX680 card I flashed - it was a PC version of the card you can easily flash within minutes to make it work on a mac pro - making you identical hardware and costing you more than 2X less than the dedicated mac version (of the same card actually, Apple users are constantly fooled and ripped off), and also it continues to work in Windows under Bootcamp or in any PC you can plug it in the future.

 

[35photo]

Hi -

I have a 2006 Mac Pro that is sputtering along (even with an SSD and 16Gb of RAM, it could never be made to do Mountain Lion (let alone Yosemite), has no ability to use USB 3.0, and can't be connected to faster Thunderbolt storage options). This might not be so bad if it weren't also for the fact that it takes 10 seconds to render an M240 file on LR (let's not talk about 400Mb negative scans…).

So if I need to keep two Firewire scanners going, what's the best option? I've been running these in XP in Boot Camp, but it doesn't seem like that would be an option on a newer Mac.

- Anyone know the latest Mac Mini that can run 10.4 or XP?
- Is there a cheap windows box (like a Mac Mini) that has 1394 and can run XP?
- Is there any virtualization software that can use Firewire? So far, it doesn't seem to work with Virtualbox or VM Fusion 7.
- Are there any good RAID storange solutions for storing 4-5Tb of images? I have multiple internal drives on my Mac Pro, and don't like the idea of a separate box for storage, but that seems to be de rigeur these days.
- Does Windows 7's virtualization of XP allow the use of Firewire devices?

The ideal solution would be to use XP and Silverfast 6.5 because it is ace at finding frames on medium-format film (much more than the Mac version or SF 8 is). But XP is difficult to license these days - and it is a real pain to install.

Thanks,
Dante

I've been there Dante! I have the same exact 2006 Mac Pro which lasted me a good long time..It was loaded with a bunch of HDDs that had my images on them. I was in your situation a little over a year ago. My solution was I kept the old Mac Pro just for scanning and got the most powerful iMac 3.5 Ghz i7 I could get with a 1 TB Fusion drive and I added 3rd party RAM 20GB total..its smokes! Huge upgrade. I had a Synology NAS already had 2 bays open so I got 2 more 2 TB HDs set up as a mirror RAID dumped all my images onto it..I got an the latest airport extreme wireless router since I'm accessing all the images from the NAS wirelessly from the iMac works just great! The wifi is as fast as being connected via ethernet its really amazing! So I pretty much have my own cloud storage solution and could if I wanted to access all my images from anywhere in the world that has internet connection and edit images in LR with the catalog being on my machine.. pretty cool stuff.. Lots of options out there..

Marko

 

[Dante_Stella]

Thanks all. I think it will be a 5K iMac i7 with all of the trimmings (16Gb RAM, 4gb video ram) and a 12Tb Raid 1. This should run the LS-8000 with Silverfast 8, and we'll see if Vuescan is any better with the Polaroid SS120 than it was before. The thing I hate is the idea of giving up the ability of SF6.5 on Windows to effortlessly and perfectly find 120 frames. This has not been the case post 10.5 on Mac or with SF8 on the PC.

Thinking out out, I will probably copy all of my working files from the Mac Pro to the Thunderbolt drive while I wait 2-3 weeks for the iMac. I think 5Tb over USB 2 should be doable by then, right? 😉

Any thoughts on Fusion vs. SSD? I'm impressed with the small SSD in my Mac Pro (fast!) and amsomewhat disinclined to buy anything with a spinning disk in the main box because heaven knows it might be another 8 years until I get around to replacing it. 🙂

Dante

 

[f16sunshine]

If I undestand correctly...Once the OS figures out your most used workflow it will keep the most recent files on the SSD portion of the Fusion drive.

Fusion seems just as fast to me as SSD.
I have a 3TB fusion in a fully specd. iMac 27.
Prior I had a 1TB in a fully Specd. Retina 15MBP.
Maybe the added cpu and RAM overcome any advantage the full SSD had over the Fusion.
For photo editing and light video the fusion has been great.

 

[willie_901]

Fusion works really well for me on my desktop 2013 fully optioned MacMini (1TB internal HD). That said, nothing beats a pure SSD set up. The 500 GB SSD on my MacBook Air is quick.

 

[majid]

Scanning itself is not particularly demanding, so I dedicated my old (2006) Macbook Pro (running XP) as a scanning machine for my LS-9000 and LS-5000, using Nikon Scan (for Digital ICE4 Pro support). Find a used machine to install XP on. Older HP workstations in SFF enclosures like a Z200 would be a good option, as they are XP compatible and usually include Firewire. In the worst case, you can use the adapter that shipped with your LS-8000. Your current Mac Pro would be an option, of course, if you can spare the space.

My main rig itself is a late 2013 Mac Pro (replacing a late 2008 Mac Pro). My home directory is on 2x1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs in a Promise J4 Thunderbolt enclosure, configured RAID 0. They measure as fast as the internal PCIe SSD on the Mac Pro. I'm not going back to spinning rust.

 

[Dante_Stella]

Great idea Majid - since my Mac Pro (notwithstanding many upgrades) is apparently only worth $300-500, I don't have a place to transplant its SSD (which was $$$), and my XP license is not transferable to another computer (nor does it run on an i7), I might as well just take the spinning drives out of the Mac Pro (because they won't last in storage) and shelve it to be a future scanning machine/file server (I also have a Pakon F235 that I know works with it and that probably won't work with 7 or 8.

All - what's the thought on video ram for the 5K? Any point to 4Gb with Lightroom? If I have to put the money somewhere, I'd rather put it on something that is not susceptible to upgrading in the future.

Dante

 

[willie_901]

Dante,

My impression is extra video memory does not benefit still photography. As far as I know, video memory only enhances video post production, animation and 3D rendering.

 

[majid]

Extra VRAM only benefits apps that can use GPU acceleration for image processing (OpenCL), e.g. Pixelmator/Acorn. If you are wed to Adobe software with their stick-in-the-mud approach to platform-specific performance boosts, don't bother. In fact, for Adobe, you are better off getting a CPU with fewer cores but higher clock speeds, as they can't leverage more than 4 cores due to inefficient coding practices:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-MacProWestmere-PhotoshopCC-scalability.html

 

[ruby.monkey]

The i7 available for the iMac is also the fastest available processor in terms of raw clock speed.

If you're using an external Thunderbolt drive anyway, spend your money on the i7 and take the smallest flash drive. You can probably save extra by taking the lowest memory option and upgrading it yourself later on.

 

[KM-25]

I have always been concerned about not making my 9000ED useless, storing and accessing over 20 years of digital camera files, being able to crunch through big raw files in good time, so this is what I have going on OS 10.10.1:

For travel I use a 13" retina MacBook Pro with 16GB of ram and the 1TB PCIe disgustingly fast drive.

At home I use a 2011 Mac Pro that has an upgraded processor in the form of a 6 core 3.46ghz Intel X5690. It has 48GB of ram, a GTX680 video card which makes photo Mechanic and other thumbnail renderings pretty much instant. In the 4 drive bays are 4x 4TB in RAID-5 ( 16 total for 12 usable ) that backs up to a 12TB external. In the lower optical slot is a 240GB SSD for scratch. Above the video card is a Apricorn Velocity 2 Duo with a pair of Samsung EVO 840 500GB SSD drives in RAID-0 for boot, music, iOS device backup and scratch. In the top PCIe slot is a eSata / USB3 card, 4 outlets in total.

The 9000ED is connected via a FW 400 to 800 cord. There are 5 more external drives connected either by eSata or FW800. My card reader and a 480GB OWC Envoy Pro SSD transfer drive connect to the two USB3 connections. A Voyager Q dock is used on an eSata connection for bare 6TB and other drives which are stored off site in a pelican case, backed up weekly. All told about 50TB of storage.

I run CS6, the latest version of Silverfast, Capture One Media Pro, Premiere and a host of other software that make good use of all the hardware. I might consider a new MacPro in the future at around revision 3, still need to test the stability of FireWire to Thunderbolt adapted on my Retina, but for now, my current machine crushes it.

That's how I roll...