RAID in Early 2009 Mac Pro

being "tech guy" of house, brother has requested upgrade 4,1 mac pro. has:

2 x 2.26 quad-core xenons
12 gb ram
3 x geforce gt 120
4 x 2 tb hdd's in software raid 10
80 gb ssd in 1 of optical bays boot disk.

uses computer video editing, in final cut pro x, he'll dabble in adobe suite. said wants more speed , needs less storage; i.e., doesn't need main drive more 2 tb. budget not issue here, future-proofing is: don't want have upgrade long time.

ram upgrade simple enough, right? head on owc , grab 24 or 32 gb of whatever goes 4,1 generation mac pro.

video cards know next nothing about. don't quite understand why he's got 3 of them for; monitor 30 in. cinema display. should upgrade video card(s)? maybe raedon 5770 or 5870? feel video editing isn't gpu-intensive, if is, please tell me so.

now, fun part storage. figure best solution 4 new ssd's replace 12 tb ones, , stick ssds in raid 0. question is: need raid card that? or, guess, more accurately: want raid card that? , if do, one? assume not apple one, see it's not liked.

guess external raid enclosure thingie leftover disks , use them backup/additional storage.

also, want upgrade cpu? still feel bottle neck him not in cpu in read/write times, if has outdated @ point (or in near future), maybe should fix that.

 

if ever pegs 8 cores (not 16 threads), cpu upgrades (especially 6 core chips) huge boost.

may have 3 gpus sort of gpu acceleration, don't think gt120 can that?

gpu upgrade in terms of perf: 5870 (apple) > 6870 (flashed) > 5770 > 4870

if has page-outs, more memory.

surely 256gb/512gb ssd (270mb/sec read , write) should suffice?

if not need sata 3 pci-e card full 500+mb/sec read , write.

limited 660mb/sec due chipset , 270mb/sec via sata 2, need pci-e 4x card or better beat that.

perhaps 2 intel 320 300gb drives in raid 0 , 2 wd black 1tb data?

don't think needs more 300mb/sec tbh.

 

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