Finally a HDD upgrade! What should I expect?

[bzollinger]

I'm finally upgrading the system drive in my PPC dual 2.0 G5. It's been running the stock 160GB sata drive from day one. The OS has been upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5.7, and one archive and re-install has been done recently all on the original build from 2005.

Today I purchased Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive to replace my system drive. I plan on doing a fresh install to 10.5 then re-installing all of the apps.

What kind of performance boost should I expect from this new, faster, larger HDD? Any experiences are welcome.

thanks,
BZ

 

[OZMP]

do a fresh install then use the migration utility, then repair permissions. that is my normal method.

Should boot quicker, open apps quicker etc. i run all fast drives, and keep my spare OEM drive for windoze when needed, or time machine when i am testing SL. I couldn't go back to OEM speed drives personally. my drives are 120mb/sec and the new 7200.12 1tb drives are 160mb/sec so thinking i might grab a pair of those shortly!

 

[nanofrog]

I usually run drives in RAID, but I do test them out as single disks as well first.

Given what you've had, I think you'll be quite happy. Drive throughput has come a good ways since your G5 was new.

 

[Dr.Pants]

Given what you've had, I think you'll be quite happy. Drive throughput has come a good ways since your G5 was new.

For certain! I can't wait to compare my Hitachi drive with the Samsung in the mail; especially in random I/Os.

 

[OZMP]

i will be adding two of these and removing my OEM 7200.8 http://www.scorptec.com.au/computer/33748-st31000528as

30% quicker than the two 7200.11's i already have.

What drive did you choose exactly?

 

[Dr.Pants]

Samsung HD103UJ

On hindsight, the HE103UJ may have been a slightly better idea; at the time I ordered, it wasn't at the Egg. Now its there with a free 500GB drive as a freebie.

All that I know is that it should perform much better, and The Price Was Right.

 

[Mac Husky]

Samsung HD103UJ

On hindsight, the HE103UJ may have been a slightly better idea; at the time I ordered, it wasn't at the Egg. Now its there with a free 500GB drive as a freebie.

All that I know is that it should perform much better, and The Price Was Right.

Do you plan to put more of them into a RAID?
Otherwise the HD is absolutely the right decision.

I opened up this thread some days ago concerning the Samsung you´ve ordered.

Still thinking about going HE or HD for RAID0. Price in Germany is 153 Dollar vs 95 Dollar.

 

[bzollinger]

i will be adding two of these and removing my OEM 7200.8 http://www.scorptec.com.au/computer/33748-st31000528as

30% quicker than the two 7200.11's i already have.

What drive did you choose exactly?

This is the HDD I ordered. From the reviews I've read it's "all around" fast and I've had good luck with Western Digital. The price was $89 and it's got a five year warranty.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Black-WD1001FALS/dp/B001C271MA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1248024179&sr=8-1

 

[bzollinger]

I usually run drives in RAID, but I do test them out as single disks as well first.

Given what you've had, I think you'll be quite happy. Drive throughput has come a good ways since your G5 was new.

Do you run raid 1 or 0?

 

[bzollinger]

do a fresh install then use the migration utility, then repair permissions. that is my normal method.

Should boot quicker, open apps quicker etc. i run all fast drives, and keep my spare OEM drive for windoze when needed, or time machine when i am testing SL. I couldn't go back to OEM speed drives personally. my drives are 120mb/sec and the new 7200.12 1tb drives are 160mb/sec so thinking i might grab a pair of those shortly!

I didn't think about this method, but I like it! Thanks for the tip.

 

[Dr.Pants]

Do you plan to put more of them into a RAID?
Otherwise the HD is absolutely the right decision.

I opened up this thread some days ago concerning the Samsung you´ve ordered.

Still thinking about going HE or HD for RAID0. Price in Germany is 153 Dollar vs 95 Dollar.

No, no RAID for the drive - just a system drive. I don't think I'll be using over a Terabyte for boot/apps Thread's a good read as well.

 

[nanofrog]

Do you run raid 1 or 0?

RAID 5, as I wanted some redundancy with high throughputs.

 

[bzollinger]

I ended buying a retail version of the WD caviar black 1TB drives based on all the bad experiences people are having w/ Amazon's poor packaging with the OEM version. It was $20 more, but worth it.

Anyway, it's installed and once I figured out that the new drive had to be formatted by OSX first before booting to the install disk everything went smooth.

It was EXTREMLY easy to install and migrate everything over. I was kind of hoping I'd do the application installs manually so that I could install just what I needed, but it was too tempting to have it all done w/o any intervention!

And most importantly the new hard drive is signifcantly faster!!

Any other post install tasks you can suggest? I removed a bunch of unused applications, and did a permissions repair, and am on the second update.

thanks for the input and advice!
BZ