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c073186

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 2, 2007
821
3
I see that a lot of people here are buying hard drives from places other than Apple because they are cheaper or what not. My question is, does it matter what kind of HD you buy? I know that you can only buy certain video cards for Apple, but is the same true for hard drives? And, what would be a good replacement drive instead of the standard 320 GB? I don't necessarily need huge storage but want speed. I would do the 300 GB 15,000 RPM drive from Apple if only it was not an extra $585. Does anyone have any recommendations?
 
I see that a lot of people here are buying hard drives from places other than Apple because they are cheaper or what not. My question is, does it matter what kind of HD you buy? I know that you can only buy certain video cards for Apple, but is the same true for hard drives? And, what would be a good replacement drive instead of the standard 320 GB? I don't necessarily need huge storage but want speed. I would do the 300 GB 15,000 RPM drive from Apple if only it was not an extra $585. Does anyone have any recommendations?

I've always gotten Seagate Barracuda's, and they've been great for me. 7200 though, so if you need superfast drives you'll have to ok into something else.

I think just about any SATA/SATA2 drive will work in the Mac Pro, but get some confirmation from someone else too, that is just my experience, which could of course be just luck.
 
Generally any Sata2 drive will do. Make sure you get the 3 and not the 1.5. I'm kinda befuddled on brand loyalty lately a lot of the film post facilities have been seeing the cheaper WD drives fail recently and seagates reputation is on edge and I've never ever trusted maxtor seen a lot of there drives fail back in the day. I recently ordered samsungs spinpoint 750. I'm going to give those a try for a while. I'd also try to get the larger 32mb cache.

Basicly the larger and denser a drive is the more likely it is to fail. Which is why I'm hesitant to buy these 1tb drives. Seems like a lot for 3.5 inches and there still somewhat new. I would go with 500gb sata2 drives there a pretty safe bet and best bang for your buck. Usually above or below that size you're paying more per gigabyte.
 
Is there a reason not to buy 1TB drives? Would smaller drives like 500GB or maybe 750GB perform better in any way? Is the 1TB really more likely to fail?
Any thoughts appreciated!
 
I could be wrong...

I could be wrong but in my humble opinion anytime you make something denser and more complicated you're increasing the risk of failure. I believe the 1 tb drives have 5 200gb platters (not sure of the exact numbers) While the 500 could have fewer and less dense platters. Thats all I was refering too.
 
I could be wrong but in my humble opinion anytime you make something denser and more complicated you're increasing the risk of failure. I believe the 1 tb drives have 5 200gb platters (not sure of the exact numbers) While the 500 could have fewer and less dense platters. Thats all I was refering too.

Yes you are wrong. Increase in areal density does not neccesarily increase
the failure rate, but it will increase the speed (everything else being equal, ie
rpm, cache, seek time, etc) Hitachi drives (the first 1TB) has 4 platters vs.
Seagate's 3 (7200.11). I'm not sure about the 500GBs
 
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