Almost ready to buy, looking for real world experience from people who push their MBP to the limits. (Forensics exp helpful)

Evening,

What I'm looking to do could be mirrored in other industries to some point, so I would love some real world experiences and thoughts from people on this forum to solidify my decision to go Mac. Quick background is I'm a heavy Windows guy, but open minded to all other OS. In what I do I need access to every possible OS to do computer forensics on. The primary applications I will use will be linux and windows based, but there are still quite a few related to the Mac.

Based off of my research I would be heavily relying on VMWare Fusion or Parallels, and in rarer cases, bootcamp. OSX will still be my primary OS except the rare cases where I have to boot into another OS directly (maybe 2% of the time).

The *key* is pushing the chipset to it's limits related to I/O and interrupts over processor utilization, and full interoperability between operating systems. I do not mind booting into an OS directly if it comes down to it.

Anyone else who does things similar on a daily basis I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts on how the Mac has benefited you, or been an issue.

Thank you ahead of time for your time and thoughts. It is greatly appreciated

 

Movie Industry:
Rendering short movies with Octacore Mac Pro maxed out. Rendering time is about twice as fast as my Windows quadcore computer's.

Using virtual machines will lower the performance by a bit. If you want to get the most out of your computer, I'd suggest running a native OS instead of virtualizing them, at least for single user for personal use.

It's almost inpussible to "push" the chipset's I/O limit. Unless you're using a program to purposely create I/O traffic, then it's pretty rare to ever going close to the Chipset's IO limit.

The only thing that's bad about Mac is its price. Similar configured Windows machines will usually be cheaper.

 

In any case the bottle neck is going to be the HDD, so If I were you, I'd put in a SSD, and if you don't buy a large SSD, then a HDD in the Optibay. Just carry a slim DVD burner if you need one.

You will be fine running quite a few VMs at the same time, since they just stay in memory. Just build a slim copy of XP, and make sure it's completely cut down if it really bothers you.

 

You would be surprised. Basically if I'm running a case via Encase I'd have 5-10 keyword searches hammering the case file, digging through unallocated space, and then add a few case processing tasks like a HTML carver, or recovering webmail from user artifacts and your HD will be crying for mercy.

 

dont buy a non-windows machine just to do all your work in a virtual machine.

PITA.

just get a windows machine to do your work if 95% of your apps are in windows.

problem solved.

 

I'm talking about chipset I/O limition not being maxout. HDD I/O limition is far from, not even close to the limitation of the Chipset. I think the limitation of the north bridge to the CPU is limited to around 5000-10000MB/s while HDD is limited to 300MB/s due to the limiation of SATA interface.

HDD is very slow compared to the I/O capabilities of other devices.
E.g. I can easily max out the HDD's capabilities by doing simple consequtive random searches in a large database. The random read/write speed of my hdd is only about 3MB/s which is actually pretty fast.

 

Agreed, but that really wasn't the question.

To break it down I'll do 50% of my work in Windows, 30% in Linux, and 20% in OSX. The interesting note is a Windows machine can do forensics work on anything but OSX, so any images of Macs we receive require a OSX platform to do the work on. So the reality is we need machines that have the potiential to do and become anything based on the scope of the engagement. The challenge though is the scope you get as a prelim, never accounts for the issues you will run into in the field. I once had a client's CIO get on the phone and say 'we have 35 Dell PC's in our Honolulu office', sine you generally don't question the CIO of a company when they are talking about their own equipment, we packed up preparing for Windows machines and walked into a Mac lab.......

 

Build yourself a core i7 machine.
Since you your programs are Windows based rather than OSX based, therefore you dont need to spend the extra for apple tax.

 

"any images of Macs we receive require [an] OSX platform to do the work on"

then you have no choice. get a macintosh, problem solved.

 

There's 1 option that's on the border line of legit for running MacOS on a windows machine.

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/01/18/PearPC.html

Technically, PearPC is emulating the Mac hardware thus sort of not breaking MacOS's ELUA. The ELUA says the OS can only be run on Mac hardware, but didn't specify if it can be virtual Mac hardware or not.

Running MacOS natively on PC is illegal thus cannot be used in your situation.

 

As said above, looks like you have no legitimate choice but to go Mac.

I'd buy spares if you're worried about uptime, that's what I do. Other makers - even famously bad-support companies like Sony - I can afford to take the risk and only get bitten very infrequently, certainly not enough to budget for a spare as a de facto requirement, as I do with Apples.

Engineering, analysis, design (review), colossal spreadsheeting in my case as well as the usual. The analysis part as well as other lesser related applications are unique to OS X.