Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Best internal HD for MacPro?
- Thread starter waistdeep
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I have read many that are running Western Digital's Caviar Green 2tb to have good luck. I am running the Green 2tb in my Drobo and so far so good! In my Mac Pro I run two Caviar Black 1tb in raid 0 and so far so good. Western Digital is the most popular on Mac Rumors from what I have read. Caviar Black 1tb is highly regarded by mac pro users.
What will you be using the drive for? Scratch for Final Cut? Extra room for your iTunes Library? pr0n? Photo library? It's kind of a hard to recommend computer parts if you don't know what it will be used for.
Greens are good for archiving mass data. Blacks are good for striped system and apps disks unless you prefer to use SSDs for that purpose.
I'm using a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB. A bit pricey, but outstanding performance for the price.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/825842/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/825842/
i'm getting two black 1tb's...
if i order two of these:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C271MA/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3948255565&ref=pd_sl_568qe0m7o1_e
do i need any other wires or little bits for a mac pro installation?
I want to have them in a raid-0... will software raid be sufficient? and should i expect a decent speed increase over the stock 500gb hd?
danks guys for this useful post...
r.
if i order two of these:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C271MA/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3948255565&ref=pd_sl_568qe0m7o1_e
do i need any other wires or little bits for a mac pro installation?
I want to have them in a raid-0... will software raid be sufficient? and should i expect a decent speed increase over the stock 500gb hd?
danks guys for this useful post...
r.
They are good to go without other bits.
SW RAID0 is fine on Mac Pros. Make sure you backup!
They should be significantly faster.
One last question...
...how would the speed compare to an intel Solid State Drive?
...the other route would be to get one of those for my startup and apps, and keep the 500gb for the storage for now...
thanks
r.
...how would the speed compare to an intel Solid State Drive?
...the other route would be to get one of those for my startup and apps, and keep the 500gb for the storage for now...
thanks
r.
It will be generally slower, but the price per gigabyte here is still significantly lower.
And yes you can get a SSD for boot and store your other stuff on an regular HDD.
No Software Raid with Bootcamp....?!
Thanks for all of your replies!
I just realized that, being a Bootcamp User, I believe that Software Raid-0 will NOT WORK for either the startup or the storage when in Windows...!??
Is that True? A google search comes up with little concrete information, and a few suggestions that it is not easily workable...
If that is the case, how is this for a decent setup:
100gb SSD: OS Bootable, Partitioned in half for osx/windows 7
1.5 tb caviar: Storage, partitioned in macjournaled extended, accessible from windows 7 using macdrive...
is that workable?
would time machine easily backup a two drive system?
thanks!
r.
Thanks for all of your replies!
I just realized that, being a Bootcamp User, I believe that Software Raid-0 will NOT WORK for either the startup or the storage when in Windows...!??
Is that True? A google search comes up with little concrete information, and a few suggestions that it is not easily workable...
If that is the case, how is this for a decent setup:
100gb SSD: OS Bootable, Partitioned in half for osx/windows 7
1.5 tb caviar: Storage, partitioned in macjournaled extended, accessible from windows 7 using macdrive...
is that workable?
would time machine easily backup a two drive system?
thanks!
r.
Correct.
A software RAID setup under one OS can't be read by another. You'd need to use a card of some kind to do that.
Yes it will work.
TM can handle multiple drives IIRC, but you'd need a separate bit of software for the Windows side.
That is right. To me there is no known way to do a RAID with Windows on a Mac Pro. Even RAID cards will not work regularly with booting into EFI and Windows.
Your setup would work but I believe that you will have space problems with one 100 GB SSD. The problem is that the controller needs empty space for wear levelling. More partitions on one drive need even more free space. I would recommend two 64 or 80 GB separate SSDs.
The Windows partition or drive can be cloned regularly with Winclone to the OS X drive.
Then TM would backup the whole system to another drive, NP.
Another way would be to have your raid set up on however many drives you want and then have another separate drive for Bootcamp.
I have 4x1TB in raid 0 backed up to 4x2TB WD Greens in a drobo (which I have found fantastic - after 7 months no problems).
I have a fifth drive attached to the second superdrive in bootcamp and has also been working flawlessly. The OP has said they don't want it to get too hard (which this set up can take some fiddling), but it is another option.
My question that I can hope someone might answer is can the early 2009 Mac Pro (stats below), can it handle me changing my 4 x 1TB drives with 4 x 2TB WD Blacks? Will there be a strain on the system or anything like that?
MacPro4,1, Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 2.93 GHz, Memory: 8 GB
I have 4x1TB in raid 0 backed up to 4x2TB WD Greens in a drobo (which I have found fantastic - after 7 months no problems).
I have a fifth drive attached to the second superdrive in bootcamp and has also been working flawlessly. The OP has said they don't want it to get too hard (which this set up can take some fiddling), but it is another option.
My question that I can hope someone might answer is can the early 2009 Mac Pro (stats below), can it handle me changing my 4 x 1TB drives with 4 x 2TB WD Blacks? Will there be a strain on the system or anything like that?
MacPro4,1, Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 2.93 GHz, Memory: 8 GB
I have dual 640 WD blacks in a raid 0, with a backup drive. The 4th bay has a windows only disk. For more storage, I used the extra sata ports for a dual esata case from macsales, only 50 or so bucks. Works great, even for time machine.
The full capacity for a MacPro4,1 is at least 14 TB. You need a RAID card with 5 ports though.
8 TB in the regular HDD bays. 4 TB in the second optical bay using ODD SATA "B" and one RAID card port. And 2 TB in 4x 2,5" HDDs in a Transintl 4DX bay connected to the RAID card ports.
I have the apple raid card and was just planning on replacing the normal 4 drive bays with the 2TB WD Blacks, so it looks like it should be ok. Just wanted to make sure I was going to max out the computer with the WD Blacks. Thanks!
Do you already have Blacks in your Pro?
If not maybe you might want to change to Green drives. Those Blacks are unbelievably loud. I currently have two 1TB drives in my Pro raided together but I will replace them by 2TB Green drives soon. I hope those are a little less noisy.
BTW: The maximum capacity in the Pro should be around 16TB, using 2TB 3.5" and 1TB 2.5" drives without loosing the first optical drive.
Yes. Western Digital released it's first 1TB drives (12.5mm) a few weeks ago and they should easily fit in the DX4.
Hi. No currently I have the 4x1TB's that apple provide. Hitachi I think. They are quite. But, I do have it all connected up to an Eaton UPS - which is pretty loud and I don't think there is much I can do about it's noise
I had thought about the WD Greens, but then I read up on their web site that the blacks give better performance... so... now I'm not sure
I just saw the announcement about being able to get the 2TB drives for the Mac Pro from apple. USD $550 each. Surely, they jest.
Of course the blacks give a better performance, but you definitely pay the price for that.
Not only are they considerably more expensive that the Greens, in addition to that, they are really, really loud as I said before. I always hate it when they spin up in my system.
My other drives are either 2.5" drives or WD Greens.
Anyway, if you really want to have best performance, personally I would buy the Raid Edition drives.
They are more reliable than the Blacks, have the same performance and are strangely cheaper than the Blacks.
Not only are they considerably more expensive that the Greens, in addition to that, they are really, really loud as I said before. I always hate it when they spin up in my system.
My other drives are either 2.5" drives or WD Greens.
Anyway, if you really want to have best performance, personally I would buy the Raid Edition drives.
They are more reliable than the Blacks, have the same performance and are strangely cheaper than the Blacks.
I usually find the enterprise drives are more.
For example, I can usually locate a Black 1TB for ~$100USD, while the RE3 1TB can be had for ~$160USD (last checked about a week ago). Free shipping can sweeten the deal a bit, as it all adds up.
Especially when buying mulitple drives from multiple e-tailers to reduce getting all the drives from the same batch. How are they for sound versus the Blacks? I've not heard of them before, will have to do some research.
Great to see you here nanofrog!