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Of the offered Mac Pro drives which is best?

The cheapest available so you can use the money saved to go buy any drive you want from somewhere else. Apple ridiculously overcharges for hard drives and there is no guarantee what manufactures drive you will get, just a guarantee on the size. A friend and I both purchased a new dual 2.8 Mac Pro about a month apart and we both received the same size drive but from a different manufacture.
 
i'll second that. It's completely random which hard drive you get, regardless of which size you pay for. So the best thing to do is to get the default option and use it as a spare drive. Best drives out right now are either the F1s or the new 640gb WDs with 320gb platters...the "green" ones should also run quietly and be long-lasting.
 
Absolutely. What they said x3.

My benchmarks showed that even a 4 year old small SATA Western Digital drive gathering dust in an old PC was almost 2x as fast as the stock drives Apple is shipping. :mad::rolleyes:

Just don't do it. Buy the single 320g and replace that IMMEDIATELY with either a Hitachi 32-Meg Drive (make sure acoustic Management is off), a Samsung SpinPoint 32-Meg Drive, or one of the new Western Digital 320-Gig Platter Drives (NOT the Energy GREEN drives).

You AND your Mac will thank you for it in the morning :D
 
Ditto, I just tested a few of the drives out there and posted the results in another thread, but here are the results I found. The score is a score generated by a program called xbench. It seems the best bang for the buck right now is the new 640GB Western Digital Caviar drive. At least according to the xbench benchmark.

Original 500GB drive that came with the MacPro - 57.5 (Came with the mac pro)
Western Digital Raptor 150GB - 83.5 (Price $160) This is the 10,000 RPM drive
Hitachi's 1TB - 70.3 (Price $200)
WD Caviar 640 GB - 102.3 (Price $100)

Here is a link a review of the WD Caviar drive.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14380
 
GotPro said:
Absolutely. What they said x3.

My benchmarks showed that even a 4 year old small SATA Western Digital drive gathering dust in an old PC was almost 2x as fast as the stock drives Apple is shipping. :mad::rolleyes:

Just don't do it. Buy the single 320g and replace that IMMEDIATELY with either a Hitachi 32-Meg Drive (make sure acoustic Management is off), a Samsung SpinPoint 32-Meg Drive, or one of the new Western Digital 320-Gig Platter Drives (NOT the Energy GREEN drives).

You AND your Mac will thank you for it in the morning :D
Click to expand...

32meg seems quite small... how do you force programs to the larger secondary drive?
 
vansouza said:
32meg seems quite small... how do you force programs to the larger secondary drive?
Click to expand...

32mb cache is one of the largest (if not the largest) right now for harddrive cache.

id avoid green drives, their powercycling seems a bit off, especially in macpros.
ive noticed it has similar qualities to that of an external manufactured drive; wher eit will spin down when not in use on its own an dwill take a while to spin back up and either becomes undetecable or is slow.

the 640Gb is the best value at this point, the 2 platters are sufficient and id take a 640Gb over a Raptor,,,,there is no real performance boost with the raptor...well atleast not anymore...the cache and the rpm is really not noticable at all. i prefer space over something insignificant as what the raptor offers.
 
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