Early Mac Pro 2008 vs The MacBeast: Disk Speed Benchmarks

How fast is the disk access speed for MacBeast (my custom built Hackintosh) compared to my early 2008 Mac Pro? Let’s take a look.

First the specs:

The MacBeast is running a 3.6 Ghz Intel Core i5 processor, with 16GB of DDR3 1333 Mhz RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 (4GB) card. The early 2008 Mac Pro has a 2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 14GB of DDR2 800 Mhz RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT (256 MB) GPU.

The MacBeast sports a Corsair BX 240GB solid state drive (SSD) attached to a SATA-3 bus. The early 2008 Mac Pro has an Other World Computing 240GB Mercury Electra 6G SSD attached to a SATA-1 2 bus. Below are the results for the MacBeast. To measure the performance of both drives, I used Disk Speed Test v2.2.2 from Blackmagicdesign.

Now we have a look at the early 2008 Mac Pro:

The MacBeast trounced the early 2008 Mac Pro, in both read and write speeds. Write speeds for the MacBeast were 1.85 times as fast as the Mac Pro. Read speeds for the MacBeast were 2.4 times as fast as the Mac Pro.

While the multi-core performance between the two machines are close, it’s the MacBeast’s impressive single core performance and SATA-3 interface that helps it blow the doors off the early 2008 Mac Pro when it comes to disk reads / writes.

Color me impressed.

-Krishna