Setting up a new mac office

[marcg]

Hi all,

I'm splitting from my business partner and moving out of his office. For various reasons, I cannot claim ownership of the whole of the existing set up which is 3 iMacs, a mac server, a RAID array, a photocopier/laser printer, a network switch and a set of 5x 1TB external hard drives being used for backup. It remains to be discussed, but I think I will be walking away with 2 iMacs and the photocopier.

So I'm looking to build a new set up in our new premises - I'm thinking to replace the server in the set up with another mac and to have a pair of external 1TB drives for daily backups. I'd like three iMacs so that we have the ability to have temporary staff when we need them.

So now the details - we basically run sketchup and visualiser and nothing else. Our best iMac is a 2013 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 but the other one would be a 2011 2.5Ghz i5. They are both ok for the job but neither is flying and some of the visualiser renders take 20 hours. So I'm thinking the new 3rd mac could be an upgrade. Which would make the 2011 the server/temp worker.

Questions
1. Is this practical? Is having the 3rd mac as a server going to make it unusably slow?
2. Do we need another network switch or can three macs and a printer be connected to a router and function as a local network? Could this be done wirelessly? We don't sent out much over 20MB so speed is not essential. That said, most sketchup files are ~250MB so speed of opening off the server is an important consideration.
3. Instead of/as well as the 3rd iMac, should we be considering a dedicated server or a network storage device?
4. I don't want to buy a brand new imac unless it will make a serious difference in performance. I'm guessing it is the video card processing that is limiting us at the moment - was there a set up in performance after 2013 and, if so, what is the oldest/cheapest entry point to benefit from that?


Many thanks in advance!
Marc

[marcg]

Sketchup files, image files, cad drawings, word and excel docs. Sketchup will be opening and autosaving from the server - not planning on copying files to desktop and copying them back as that will only lead to file confusion.

[marcg]

The current system is five external hard drives (MondayTWTF) using Retrospect, yesterdays always being taken home overnight. Five seems overkill? Also, Retrospect seems an expensive solution as well - 119EUR for a single machine with no support.

[marcg]

Also, I'm keen to buy a new machine - I think we need three - so if it did the job of a NAS it would save that cost.

[marcg]

Google seems to agree - Time Machine is a great shout.

Mac mini? Maybe, but it depends on my other question - I'd like to upgrade to a faster machine which will mean we have three macs for up to three people. Can one act as the server without being functionally useless? If having someone using the "server" as a workstation means the whole thing slows up then we need a dedicated file server or NAS or Mac mini.

Edited by marcg on Tuesday 31st January 14:26

[marcg]

We have only 200GB of data as far as I can see. 1TB is the capacity of all the various components of the current system.

Cloud storage sounds like a good idea.

[marcg]

Yes, we use OpenOffice.

[marcg]

Hi again,

So I've taken advice from a guy I know...

Conclusions -

1. Buy a secondhand cheese grater desktop i5 for best value for money upgrade.

2. Run the oldest iMac as the file server.

3. Get something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! as a incremental backup and point it at Dropbox or Amazon cloud servers.

4. If the file server mac is unusable as another workstation, buy a mac mini to do the server job.

Any flaws with the above plans?

3. Needs some refinements.

I don't think we need full disk images since we use Autocad (old version, we have CDs), Sketchup (have licences and would install from online download), OpenOffice and Photoshop (subscription). Emails are gmail-based. So if a computer tanked it, we could do a fresh install. Or we could do a Time Machine backup of each machine on to one of the others.

I think (and correct me if I'm wrong) we could just back up the file server "work" folder. One original big backup and then incremental ones nightly?

All advice muchly appreciated!

[marcg]

My understanding is the server will prioritise sharing files over the user? Our oldest iMac will be used once a week. If it becomes a problem, mini Mac?

Unless you are telling me a cheese grater (by which I think we mean a aluminium g5 tower?) Will cope in both roles?

[marcg]

Thanks to both. My thinking is we are on fairly old imacs at the moment and coping fine. As I'm buying a new Mac, how cheaply I can buy a secondhand one that will see a serious performance improvement over the ones we have. Clearly buying the best would do that but given our starting point, how cheaply can we do second best?

[marcg]

As in, would a 2012 pro out perform a 2013 2.7ghz i5 iMac? Given that we could put in a ssd, more ram, better graphics card...

[marcg]

Sketchup and vizualizer? Both involve rendering 3d geometry. SU suffers with big models, viz is more of a traditional renderer so would probably just work quicker with a better graphics card. But I'm making stuff up now, we are well past the boundary of my IT understanding...

[marcg]

Been reading about specs on sketchup forums. It is indeed a single thread program so multi cores will have no effect. I need to monitor how much ram we are using on the imacs we have but my guess is the slow navigation around the models is graphics card limited rather than CPU. Someone wrote textures are CPU, polygons are GPU.
Faster Xeon's seem to be only £3-400 so it would be a case of looking for one with a decent graphics card already installed.

[marcg]

Buffalo - the imacs we are currently using are fine for what we do (architecture for 20 odd flats at a time) but when we get excited about textures or import too many components the models slow down. So we need better but not to the level you do.
After 15 years, I'm scared to go back to pcs. Every one that I use (belonging to other people) seems clunky compared to our 6 year old Mac's. Clunky as in needing cleaning up, not working like new. Our Mac's work well. And, secondhand, Mac's are good value IMHO.

[marcg]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/192109532910

Am I missing something or would this be ideal?

3.2ghz 16gb ram, 512gb ssd, NVIDIA Geforce 8800GT 512MB

[marcg]

The create link doesn't seem to do anything costing less than £1600. Being limited to one core CPU, the eBay link seems like it would do the same job?

[marcg]

Vaud and Zespak - yes, it's the "it just works" that appeals to me - hence I wouldn't consider a hackintosh. I was also very impressed when I brought a 7 year old macbook air to the genius bar for... something...? Can't remember what, but anyway, they fixed it FOC including installing the latest OS.

Buffalo - unfortunately Sketchup is not on that list. Does anyone have a guide to graphics cards? Sketchup forums suggest NVIDIA is the way to go (over AMD) and it needs to be a 3D optimised card with over 1GB of RAM. A quick google throws up various cards for only around £30. So my previous linked eBay find looks good - fast CPU, enough RAM and a SSD HD - Any thoughts? It's not like its a bargain either, there seems to be lots around that price. It's just a question of looking out for one close to Bristol and with a few of the desired upgrades.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/192109532910

[marcg]

But good otherwise? If it's only a £30 card away from what I need then that one is only ~£300 plus a monitor.

[marcg]

Oooh. Good to know.

Been researching graphics cards some more and it looks like £100+ is more realistic for a good card. It's hard to research what I need though as most review sites are aimed at gaming and I'm not clear on the distinction. Sketchup functions a lot like a game in terms of moving through a 3d environment so maybe there isn't a distinction.

[marcg]

What specs is your mac pro, btw?