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Best Hard drive for Mac pro 2.8 8 core

C

carolhayes

macrumors member
Original poster
I finally decided not to wait any longer to get the Mac Pro. I bought the base model and not I need to buy hard drives and ram. I have searched the posts and it looks like Seagate is the brand to go with but several post suggested the 7200.11 SATA Enterprise. When I googled it a class action lawsuit came up.

So, does anyone have suggestions?
 
Hard Drives:

Both Seagate and WD Enterprise Edition drives are great drives for the Mac Pro and would recommend only enterprise edition drives for the Mac Pro.
I personally love the Western Digital Raid Edition Enterprise, esp now that WD came out with the RE3 series, I would now recommend them above the .11 drives.

Ram:

I have only used apple memory (but used off eBay), but I haven't heard bad things about OWC Memory. They offer a lifetime warranty and are priced very well, 🙂
 
I agree, both Seagate and WD are great drives; I have 4 of the Seagate ES.2 1TB drives in my NAS, server grade which equates to higher MTBF (mean time between failure) and presumably more robust hardware.

You should take into consideration what your needs are as far as space and speed as well. I ended up going with 2 150gb Velociraptors Striped (Raid 0) for my "System" partition and a 1TB Western Digital Black for the "Work" drive. The stock 320gb drive I use for my Windows setup (currently Windows 7 beta).

This setup suits my needs quite well, super fast boot/application drive and a very respectably fast data drive for projects.

For memory, I picked up 6 more 1gb Apple Dimms on eBay as well, pulled from Mac Pro's. 8gb was plenty for my needs and fully populating both risers is one of a handful of configs that give the best performance.

Hope that helps... 🙂
 
carolhayes said:
I finally decided not to wait any longer to get the Mac Pro. I bought the base model and not I need to buy hard drives and ram. I have searched the posts and it looks like Seagate is the brand to go with but several post suggested the 7200.11 SATA Enterprise. When I googled it a class action lawsuit came up.

So, does anyone have suggestions?
Click to expand...

Newegg, Samsung, WD, and for Memory OWC, or ebay, Seagate I would not touch till the problems are worked out. Thats MY opinon only.

I have a Samsung 1.5TB and its silent, works fantastic, WD is good also, just like the Samsung drives.

I read / take reviews and opinions with a grain of salt, Newegg has outstanding service and I have NEVER ever had a problem with a return and I think I have only had one.

BOL
 
michaelsviews said:
Newegg, Samsung, WD, and for Memory OWC, or ebay, Seagate I would not touch till the problems are worked out. Thats MY opinon only.

I have a Samsung 1.5TB and its silent, works fantastic, WD is good also, just like the Samsung drives.

I read / take reviews and opinions with a grain of salt, Newegg has outstanding service and I have NEVER ever had a problem with a return and I think I have only had one.

BOL
Click to expand...

Microcenter has a deal going on right now on the enterprise 1TB WD's that beats out all most all of the online. Plus you can buy it and have it installed same day instead of waiting a week or more for shipping
 
Tom Sawyer said:
I agree, both Seagate and WD are great drives; I have 4 of the Seagate ES.2 1TB drives in my NAS, server grade which equates to higher MTBF (mean time between failure) and presumably more robust hardware.

You should take into consideration what your needs are as far as space and speed as well. I ended up going with 2 150gb Velociraptors Striped (Raid 0) for my "System" partition and a 1TB Western Digital Black for the "Work" drive. The stock 320gb drive I use for my Windows setup (currently Windows 7 beta).

This setup suits my needs quite well, super fast boot/application drive and a very respectably fast data drive for projects.

For memory, I picked up 6 more 1gb Apple Dimms on eBay as well, pulled from Mac Pro's. 8gb was plenty for my needs and fully populating both risers is one of a handful of configs that give the best performance.

Hope that helps... 🙂
Click to expand...


What does system partition mean? I was planning on running my software cs3 on the stock 320gb and getting (2) 1TB drives for storage and the other for time machine back ups. What do you think?
 
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM


Is this an enterprise drive?
 
carolhayes said:
What does system partition mean? I was planning on running my software cs3 on the stock 320gb and getting (2) 1TB drives for storage and the other for time machine back ups. What do you think?
Click to expand...

System being the partition or drive that OS X and apps are installed on. I think that would work fine actually, though the 320gb stock drive is not the fastest around, but plenty of space for the OS, Apps etc.

The 1TB WD Blacks are great drives, and very fast too.
 
I <3 my 1 TB Samsung F1 spinpoint hd.
I also use 8GB of ram I bought from OWC.

I preordered my 8 core desktop when they first came out and have been running the Samsung and OWC aftermarket parts for about a year now with no problems what so ever.
 
I'm thinking of upgrading my Mac Pro 2 x 2.8 to a RAID 0 setup with two 750GB drives. The WD Caviar Black 750GB is $90 and the WD RE3 750GB is $140. Is it worth the extra $50 per drive for the RE3 using them in RAID 0 in a Mac Pro?
 
Chrispy said:
I'm thinking of upgrading my Mac Pro 2 x 2.8 to a RAID 0 setup with two 750GB drives. The WD Caviar Black 750GB is $90 and the WD RE3 750GB is $140. Is it worth the extra $50 per drive for the RE3 using them in RAID 0 in a Mac Pro?
Click to expand...

IMHO, as long as you have a good backup routine planned, I'd just pick up the WD Blacks. They are great drives and have good warranty too.

On a side note, from what I've seen when you set up a raid 0 set via OS X's software raid, it can be only one partition... So you will have one big 1.39 TB partition. I wanted my system and apps to run off of a stripe set so ended up going with 2 150gb velociraptors so I wouldn't have a huge "System" drive.

Another side note: Have you sold your i7 setup yet? Someone needs to buy that thing so I stop looking at it with temptation!!! 😀
 
Two related questions.

1) Is time machine able to restore a raid 0. Ie, if I backup a 2 disk raid 0, 1 drive fails, I replace it and format/set the raid 0 back up... can I then tell time machine to restore it as it was before. (Does time machine work even if it's not physically the same HD as before?)

2) If you can't partition a software raid, can't you partition 2 drives exactly the same way, then drag the partitions together to create raid 0s for system at the top, and other files at the bottom?
 
Abidubi said:
Two related questions.

1) Is time machine able to restore a raid 0. Ie, if I backup a 2 disk raid 0, 1 drive fails, I replace it and format/set the raid 0 back up... can I then tell time machine to restore it as it was before. (Does time machine work even if it's not physically the same HD as before?)

2) If you can't partition a software raid, can't you partition 2 drives exactly the same way, then drag the partitions together to create raid 0s for system at the top, and other files at the bottom?
Click to expand...

Yes, it would be able to as once the stripe set is created/formatted, the OS will see it as just a volume and present it to you for installing/restoring to etc.

On #2... that would be interesting to know. I originally bought 2 1tb western digital blacks to setup in raid 0 and assumed I would be able to partition it, but didn't see any way of doing that once it was a raid 0 stripe set. Anyone tried to stripe previously created partitions of equal size across two drives? Would be really cool (and disappointing for me since I've gone another direction) if it worked that way. The WD Blacks are VERY fast, I'd be plenty satisfied with two of those in a raid 0 setup, I just prefer partitioning my data to segregate and organize.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
On a side note, from what I've seen when you set up a raid 0 set via OS X's software raid, it can be only one partition... So you will have one big 1.39 TB partition. I wanted my system and apps to run off of a stripe set so ended up going with 2 150gb velociraptors so I wouldn't have a huge "System" drive.

Another side note: Have you sold your i7 setup yet? Someone needs to buy that thing so I stop looking at it with temptation!!! 😀
Click to expand...

Good point. Maybe I will just snag two 500GB drives and save some money. There is only a $15 price difference between the Caviar Black and RE3 500GB drives but the RE3 has half the cache. Will that be noticeable?

The velociraptors are tempting but oh so expensive in comparison. Oh, and the Core i7 is still available. About 3 people expresses interest and nobody jumped on it.
 
Chrispy said:
Good point. Maybe I will just snag two 500GB drives and save some money. There is only a $15 price difference between the Caviar Black and RE3 500GB drives but the RE3 has half the cache. Will that be noticeable?

The velociraptors are tempting but oh so expensive in comparison. Oh, and the Core i7 is still available. About 3 people expresses interest and nobody jumped on it.
Click to expand...

I kind of doubt it would be noticeable between 16mb and 32mb of cache. Maybe to some benchmarks but that's about it.

EDIT: I see the WD blacks in 500gb now... were just 640gb and 1tb when I got mine. It's a screaming fast drive and I would probably not be able to tell THAT much difference between two of those stripped and my two velociraptors. Certainly not enough to merit the significant premium I paid for the 10K spindle speed. 🙄

Honestly, I'm quite surprised it has not moved yet, it's a beautiful system. It is exactly the system I would build if I still built my PC's, that is for sure. Last machine I built in '07 had the then high end Intel board (Bad Axe II) etc. Anyway... even though I'm very much in the Mac world for my home stuff, it is still tempting. Of course, I'm tempted by the new Mac Pro's and I definitely don't need one of those (need, want... it's so fuzzy... 😀)

I've asked a few guys I work with if they might be interested but no luck so far....
 
Tom Sawyer said:
EDIT: I see the WD blacks in 500gb now... were just 640gb and 1tb when I got mine. It's a screaming fast drive and I would probably not be able to tell THAT much difference between two of those stripped and my two velociraptors. Certainly not enough to merit the significant premium I paid for the 10K spindle speed. 🙄

I've asked a few guys I work with if they might be interested but no luck so far....
Click to expand...

I went ahead and ordered two WB Black 500GB drives and I will use the stock 320GB as a backup drive for really important items. I have a few externals as well so I can rock the RAID 0 and just be diligent about my backing up. Thanks for the recommendations!

Thanks for looking around for a buyer on the Core i7. I have listed it on Craigslist locally so hopefully someone jumps on it. The marketplace thread is so far down now that not many people are seeing it at this point.
 
Also, has the Disk Utility Apple RAID software been reliable for most people running RAID 0? I have seen a few threads recommending SoftRAID but I don't really want to spend the $129 on the software.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
Out of curiosity I googled it and it seems that the scenario above may work, IE partitioning each drive separately (but exactly) and then striping the matching partitions from each drive. Here is (an unanswered) post on a forum Multiple Partitions on Raid 0 and the guy seems to have had success.
Click to expand...
I've not done it under OS X, but it should be possible. It's been done with other OS's in software RAID.

And I've certainly been able to do it in hardware based solutions. 😛
 
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