Power Mac Dual G5 Hard Drive Question

Hello!

I just got a Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8Ghz model that has the 8 dimm slots . The Power Mac came with the stock 160gb hard drive. Currently I have that and a Seagate 300gb in the other slot. The 300gb hard drive has 16mb of cache on it, I am think about making that the main hard drive and getting a 500gb Seagate hard drive and putting that in the other slot.

I do a ton of video encoding and I have two bottlenecks at the moment, my ram (only 512mb total . . . getting the 2gb on Friday) and I am thinking my hard drive . I seriously doubt that the stock Apple 160gb hard drive has anything more than 2mb of cache, maybe, maybe 8mb, but I seriously doubt it . Also the stock hard drive is LOUD! That is currently the loudest part of my system at the moment!!!

My question is will I notice a performance increase in video encoding and general system use by switching from the stock Apple 160gb 2mb cache hard drive to the Seagate 300gb 16mb cache hard drive?

Thanks!
iGrant

princealfie said:

yes, the stock hard drive has a rather small cache and you should be using the seagate with 16mb cache!

In fact, any video scratch disk should be using the fastest cache possible. a raptor perhaps?

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Thanks for the responce! I have never had any luck with Western Digital, I have used Seagate for years, and I love there quality. I do not do any intensive video editing, such as Final Cut Pro, just some simple editing. I record tv shows with EyeTV, edit them, and then encode them to H.264 thats about all I do. I know you can get 32mb cache hard drives now, but will 16mb cache work well for what I want to do?

jeffmc said:

seconded, drop a few bucks on a 146gig 10k drive and you'll never regret it

i put a raptor in my dual 2.0 g5 and it's like a new machine

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Would have a 10K hard drive really make that much of a difference in encoding?

Thanks!!!
iGrant

junior77 said:

Raptors are not compatible (random hang ups) with older PowerMac G5 towers. Known bug from WD with a few of their drives. You would need a new PCIX SATA controller to use it.

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Thanks!!! Well that answers my question!

-iGrant

junior77 said:

FYI...

Western Digital Answer ID 1415

Problem:
After installing a WD4000YR, WD4000KD, WD360ADFD, WD7400ADFD, WD1500AHFD, or WD1500ADFD, the computer system will hang (lock up), necessitating a system re-boot.

Cause:
The Apple G5 tower does not support certain standard Serial ATA interface protocols used by the WD4000YR, WD4000KD, WD360ADFD, WD7400ADFD, WD1500AHFD, and WD1500ADFD hard drives resulting in an interface lock-up. This causes the computer system to hang.

Resolution:
The only work-around we have identified at this time is installing a SATA Host Bus Adapter (controller card), effectively circumventing the on-board interface.

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I have a Sonnet SATA PCI card that is currently not in use that I can put in my G5, I am just wondering if getting a 10K hard drive will really be a big improvement, does anyone have any benchmark results that I can see?

Thanks
iGrant