Executive summary - bought to replace wife’s aging iMac, which was limited by its 6 GB memory maximum. Cheaper than a new iMac. With an SSD & 32 MB memory, it is extremely fast and easily expandable. I also had a lot of fun setting it up ;^)
Did I mention the free shipping?
Pros: very, very fast & expandable Cons: 90 day warranty (it’s used) and 3GB SATA
Details:
With the SSD and 32 MB memory, it’s very, very fast.
At the end are the other items I bought to install on the Mac Pro. I have separate reviews for each.
I added two new HDDs to take the place of the external backup drives we now use (one for CCC and one for Time Machine) and a PCI card for attaching the USB3 external offsite backup drive.
The multi-mount let me put the SSD in the lower “CDROM” tray which allowed me to use all four bays for HDDs. I had two other older drives which I am using as a level 1 RAID. SoftRAID is very handy for setting up RAIDs and it lets me “validate” drives beforehand and monitor them afterwards, even if they are not part of a RAID.
Interestingly, a RAID 0 approaches SDD-3G speeds. If you want to use four drives and create two RAID1s, you can combine them into a RAID0 and get both speed and redundancy. I used Black Magic to check the various disk speeds — USB 3 was third behind the SSD and RAID 0.
The Pro also has two ethernet ports, which can act as a “switch” for another device (ethernet port sharing). This was handy when transferring files from the original iMac.
Cosmetically, it looks pretty good — a few rubs on the edges is all.
Conclusions:
The only downside might be the 3GB/s SATA speed limitation. If I was buying this for what Mac Pro users usually buy one, it might not perform at the highest levels. But for an iMac replacement, it’s wonderful.
Here’s what else I bought:
1.0TB Mercury Electra 3G SSD
SoftRAID v5.5 2 x 1.0TB WD Black Hard Disk Drive OWC Multi-Mount - 2.5" to 3.5" and 3.5" to 5.25" bracket set for 2009-2012 Mac Pro. NewerTech MAXPower USB/eSATA 2x2 Host Adapter
LG 23.5" Widescreen LED Monitor.
I would recommend this item to a friend! This review is from Apple Mac Pro(2010 - 2012) 3.2GHz 4-core Xeon W3565 - Used, Good condition.