It's Here!

During my lunch break, I picked-up my Mac Pro, along with my 27" Apple Cinema Display and hurried home to catch a peek of what would be my new office server.  Unlike the retail versions, these refurbs shipped in very plain boxes.  The Mac Pro came in a white box with only a small label detailing its contents.  

After opening the box, the contents were wrapped in the typical Apple aesthetic, so much so that you almost don't want to remove the clear protection surrounding the monitor.  After unwrapping its thin foam sheeting, I was pleasantly surprised with the condition of the Mac Pro.  I had read about the overwhelmingly positive experiences of others in terms of the refurbs that were purchased from the Apple Refurbished Store, and mine was no different.  This Mac Pro, for all intents and purposes, looked brand-spanking new! What a beauty!  

I still had a few minutes to spare before I had to return to work, so I decided to remove the 1TB HDD that shipped with the computer and install the two 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT drives that I had purchased prior.  An aside: I was mildly curious to see what brand drive that Apple spec'd with my Mac Pro.  I turned to be an Apple-labeled Western Digital, probably akin to a Caviar Black.  Back to the install . . . I had previously watched a step-by-step instructional video at OWC depicting how to change a hard drive in a Mac Pro, and it seemed a very simple and quick job.  After opening the Mac Pro, I must say that I was extremely impressed with the interior's layout and engineering.  Everything that the end-user may want to get to is exposed for easy access or removal.  It literally took me about 5 minutes to swap and install the drives.  Heck, I even had time for a bite to eat. 

Drive Bay 1 removed

Memory and RAID Setup

Not much beats returning home from a hard day's work to entertain the joys of setting up a RAID array.  (Insert winking emoticon here).  After another quick peek at the Mac Pro Memory Installation Video, again from OWC, and I proceeded to install the 24GB of OWC RAM.  Both the processors and the memory slots are located on a removable tray, which easily slides out with the flick of two levers. Because my Mac Pro is a 8-Core dual processor model, each CPU has its own bank of four memory slots. Placing this tray on a table top, I was able to install the memory modules in no time flat. Theoretically, this Mac could accept 8 sticks of 8GB RAM, totaling a whopping 64GB!  

Removing the processor tray

On the MacRumors forum, a person much smarter than I suggested that the easiest way to setup the RAID was to install the two "blank" drives into the Mac Pro (done) and then download and use the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant (installed onto a USB thumb drive) to both format and setup the RAID drives and install OS X Lion.  I attached the Cinema Display to the Mac Pro, and fired her up for the first time. Note that the Apple Cinema Display lacks a power button. Instead, it automatically turns on when the attached computer powers up. Clever. 

Attaching the thumb drive to a USB port, I was able to boot into the Lion Recovery assistant and enter Disk Utility.  From there, I basically followed the steps that I outlined in a previous blog to format the two drives and create a RAID 1 mirror set.  Piece of cake.  All that was left was to install Lion.  I should point out that the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant does not contain all the files for installing the OS. Instead, you must have internet access, as the majority of the installation files are downloaded from the cloud.  It took another half hour or so to complete the installation of the OS, which proceeded without a hiccup.  An evening's work, and this:

My Mac Pro Desktop