WD Caviar Black in Mac Pro 2008?

Yes, you can, but the Seagate Barracuda 3TB is the better deal at the moment.

Any sata HDD and SSD works in Mac Pro. No difference. You don't see an apple sign on a sticker anyway, so what is the difference?

Unless you like paying three times what you should, never by anything but the computer from Apple... HDs, SSDs, RAM is all available from other sources for far less.

Giuly said:

Yes, you can, but the Seagate Barracuda 3TB is the better deal at the moment.

Click to expand...

Yup! Better deal and faster too!

Seagate currently has a hit parade on their hands with the 1TB per plater 7200.14 models! Really sweet drives!

Available in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB sizes.

3TB: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...-2&keywords=Seagate+Barracuda+2&condition=new
2TB: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...-1&keywords=Seagate+Barracuda+2&condition=new
1TB: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...&keywords=Seagate+Barracuda+1TB&condition=new

All hitting the top of the speed charts - just a tad below the Velociraptor drives.
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/desktop-hdd/?sku=ST4000DM000

Seagate's reliability compared to WD

Some one a while back told me that Seagate's drives are not as reliable as Western Digital. Is this true? I currently use mostly Seagates in my Mac Pro and yet I have not experienced malfunctioning in the drives?

PowerPCMacMan said:

Some one a while back told me that Seagate's drives are not as reliable as Western Digital. Is this true? I currently use mostly Seagates in my Mac Pro and yet I have not experienced malfunctioning in the drives?

Click to expand...

I get mix opinions on durability for both brands. I think both brands are reliable. My colleagues who encountered problems with Western Digital say Seagate is better and those who encountered problems with Seagate say WD is better. I recall , though not sure, Seagate was the default HD for PowerMacs years ago before Apple decided to use WD.

I have both brands and so far both are doing fine.

Good to know! Yeah, I remember seagate was used for the PowerPC Macs as well as IBM Deskstar. Never had a problem with either brands.

Macsonic said:

I get mix opinions on durability for both brands. I think both brands are reliable. My colleagues who encountered problems with Western Digital say Seagate is better and those who encountered problems with Seagate say WD is better. I recall , though not sure, Seagate was the default HD for PowerMacs years ago before Apple decided to use WD.

I have both brands and so far both are doing fine.

Click to expand...

I've seen more defect rates (DOA & later failures) from Seagate's in recent years (~2008 on), including the enterprise models, vs. their WD counterparts FWIW (enterprise v. enterprise, ...). Next up on high failure rates is Hitachi from what I've seen.

BTW, my observations tend to be for large numbers of disks (RAID configurations), not just one or two here and there.

PowerPCMacMan said:

Some one a while back told me that Seagate's drives are not as reliable as Western Digital. Is this true? I currently use mostly Seagates in my Mac Pro and yet I have not experienced malfunctioning in the drives?

Click to expand...

Is it true? No. You can always find someone grinding their axe tho.

Was it true at one time many years ago? Maybe, I didn't hear of it if it was.
Western Digital had several "periods" like that tho.
Maxtor had a few low quality runs too.

The ones to avoid these days are Samsung. Very poor platter quality across the board.

Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital all currently make good quality desktop products with the usual caveats.

All drive manufactures produce similar drives.
Western digital owns hitachi now, seagate owns samsung, and most toshiba 3.5" are rebranded hitachi.

So honestly it doesnt matter which drive brand you choose, as its only a matter of when not if a drive is going to fail. So having adequate backups is critical.


Currently there is a great deal on 4TB Seagate ST4000DM000 on newegg for under$200

I have a couple of WD Caviar Black in my 3,1 MP. They have been running fine for over a year. The only Seagate drive I ever owned had a short life. I see no reason to change vendors.

AppleNewton said:

All drive manufactures produce similar drives.
Western digital owns hitachi now, seagate owns samsung, and most toshiba 3.5" are rebranded hitachi.

So honestly it doesnt matter which drive brand you choose, as its only a matter of when not if a drive is going to fail. So having adequate backups is critical.


Currently there is a great deal on 4TB Seagate ST4000DM000 on newegg for under$200

Click to expand...

Actually, Seagate only bought Samsung's HDD business, not its SSD business.

The only drive that has ever failed on me is a Seagate, but then it was probably five or six years old and gave enough warning that I didn't lose any data.

The rest of my HDDs are Samsung and I can say that I've really abused them and they just keep running. Too bad I can't get them anymore. I just bought the 2TB Seagate at Newegg with a free PCIe USB 3.0 card, a deal even if the card doesn't work in my Mac Pro.

Just to say, I have about twelve or so hard drives with sizes from 250GB to 2 TB in two computers and three external eSATA boxes. I would never buy LaCie externals again, no fans or underpowered fans in their cases means the bridge boards always fail, have three dead cases sitting around while the drives continue to live in the external boxes. Getting cheap externals and filling them with drives works for me, because even if the case fails, just had a Rosewill fail, the internal power circuit died, the drives survive to fight another day.