I heard completely opposite opinions on the VelociRaptor disk:
- This is the most reliable and the fastest HD available now
vs.
- It is not faster than a regular 7,200 rpm HDD and crashes more often.
I need a good and not-too-low system disk because I need to load many heavy apps. SSD (about 250GB) is too expensive, so my idea was to copy OS from original Mac Pro’s HDD to a 300GB VelociRaptor. Additionally I want to use two 150GB VelociRaptors (RAID 0) for Lightroom and iMovie libraries (I have a chance to buy these two 150's really cheap).
Is it a good idea? Should I move OSX to VelociRaptor or leave it on the original disk? Do you have any experience or knowledge about VelociRaptors?
Thanks
The Western Digital Velociraptor is an enterprise level hard drive that is very fast and very reliable. As you mentioned, not nearly as fast as an SSD, but they are very, very reliable and have a stellar reputation.
As for Velociraptors crashing, I think this is an untrue fact. Well, hard drives can crash, but I bet that Velociraptors crash less than other non-enterprise level HDDs. Again, Velociraptors are very reliable enterprise level HDDs. That's what they are made for, speed and reliability. A testament to their reliability is the 5 year warranty Western Digital offers with the drive.
I think that when your reading, "It is not faster than a regular 7200RPM HDD", the source is speaking in terms of some 2TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache hard drives like the Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB, Western Digital RE4 2TB, Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB, and Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 2TB. There may be some others, but in general, I believe these are considered the fastest 2TB HDDs. In that case, the statement isn't necessarily true. From what I have learned, the 600GB Velociraptor and these other 2TB HDDs I mentioned are kind of neck and neck in terms of performance. Here is a link to confirm this. There are benchmarks are toward the bottom of the page :
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_velociraptor_review
I used a 300GB Velociraptor in my previous Mac pro, a 2009 8-Core as an applications/system/boot drive, and I never had any problems whatsoever. The drive was quiet, fast, and reliable. I'm considering the purchase of either a 600GB Velociraptor or other enterprise level 2TB HDD for my system boot drive in my 2010 Mac Pro, myself. I can afford an OWC 240GB SSD, but I just can't justify the cost and need for that much speed. I'd rather save the money and spend it on something else that I can get more joy out of.
I've also heard that its not the smartest idea to RAID-0 two HDD's for a boot drive, but I'm not sure if that opinion is being too overly-cautious because if your backing up that RAID-0 onto one single hard drive, than your relatively safe. Its tempting, two 600GB Velociraptors in RAID-0 (1.2TB), but at that cost I could have an SSD to boot from, but it would only be around 200GB-256GB. SSD's are so, so tempting, but I think I can wait another year or two. To tell you the truth, I'm more tempted to throw an SSD in place of the optical drive on my Macbook Pro, than put one on my Mac Pro.
What "heavy apps" do you use?