3.5" Hard drive for Mac Pro

[Maccho]

Hi Guys,

Well I hope in the near future they will update the Mac Pro, if not I am buying an older version.... Anyhow cut to the chase, because I want to save money, I was thinking of buying 3.5" hard drives separately.

Also thinking of buying a drobo for my home network.

SO I was wondering where online is the cheapest yet reliable place I can buy hard drives?

I know Crucial is good for RAM, but just havent found a hard drive site.

Thanks for your help!
Maccho

 

[monokakata]

You don't necessarily need a "hard drive site." A general purpose hardware site will be fine.

There are many: New Egg is popular and has a good reputation. Amazon, the same. Too many others to list.

Some smaller outfits are fine also. I used to buy from a place called ZipZoomFly. Their prices were good and so was their service but they had nowhere near the stock that the big places do. I'm sure there are others like it.

When you go to buy your disk, I'd recommend buying a "bulk pack" or "bare" drive. You don't need a retail packaged drive.

Be careful and check the model numbers. There are older model drives out there. That's not necessarily bad, but you will find an almost bewildering variety of drives that appear to be the same, but in fact aren't.

Watch the rotational speed (7200 vs "variable" or 5400). Nobody's trying to cheat you at the reputable places, but at the same time you can easily click on something that isn't actually what you think it is, or what you really want.

If you see something that seems like a good buy to you, get the exact model number and Google it. You may find that it wasn't one of that company's best efforts (for example, you can still find Seagate 1.5 TB drives out there, and they don't have a good reputation).

Sometimes a drive jumps out and leads the pack for a while. I haven't been buying drives for several months (waiting for the prices to drop back down again) and when I read a test of the new Seagate 3 TB (ST3000DM001) I was surprised by how much better it seems to be than what's out there in the high-capacity range now.

I'm saying that you just can't know which manufacturer is going to hit a homer. Or strike out.

 

[Maccho]

Thanks for the great reply, I was looking at newegg and its quite good the prices.

This is a great help.

Thank you!