Ok, I need some advice. I have a Mac Pro and I am looking to buy some HDDs for the beast. I want a really fast system/scratch disk and a 1TB Media HDD. For the system drive I am leaning towards a Raptor, but I am not sure if these are the fastest for my uses. I want a drive that can boot OS X fast and launch Applications fast. As for the 1Tb drive which would have the fastest coping ability for large files?
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Hardrives
- Thread starter Frozonecold
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I will certainly look at that drive but your Benchmark was very general and for my uses i just need speed for large files. Also you only compared three drives I would like to find a comparison of some more drives. Thanks very much though.
Get 2 matching drives and go RAID 0. You'll have more than enough disk reading speed with any striped RAID.
That's definitely an option... even 2 old slow drives will be much much faster in RAID 0 than any single fast drive (speaking VERY generically)...
ESPECIALLY when transferring large files!
First I don't want to setup a RAID because I do lots of video encoding and I do not want to use up more CPU cycles also I don't want to have a higher chance of failure. The fast drive is different from the large drive, so I don't care if the fast drive can transfer large files quickly, because it will not be doing that. Thanks for the help.
Amongst other things, but yeah it is used a lot for mass storage and video encoding. I have a collection of several hundred DVDs waiting to be encoded.
I still don't understand your logic that a striped RAID uses too many CPU cycles that will affect your video encoding. Without being insulting, I suggest you do some thread searches on video encoding and HD's with a Mac Pro.
"The fast drive is different from the large drive, so I don't care if the fast drive can transfer large files quickly, because it will not be doing that."
If you read some previous threads here, you'll find that the new 750GB and 1TB drives boot faster than the 10k rpm Raptors.
"The fast drive is different from the large drive, so I don't care if the fast drive can transfer large files quickly, because it will not be doing that."
If you read some previous threads here, you'll find that the new 750GB and 1TB drives boot faster than the 10k rpm Raptors.
So you're using Handbrake and Mac the Ripper? Those depend entirely on processing power, not on HD's.
Well you could always ante-up the $1000 for the RAID card and off-load the work, but...
I'm getting a Mac Pro for digital content conversion and storage (ripping DVDs and CDs and converting all my downloaded videos) to feed to an
TV and right now I am thinking using two 1TB drives in a software RAID 0 set which I would then back-up to an external unit via Time Machine.1. It will use about 5% of CPU for striped RAID and if I setup 2 RAIDS, one for scratch disk, one for storage then that is 10% of the CPU cycles.
2. I will look into that. I really want to use separate drives, but I will have to check that out.
I am aware, I was simply justifying my purchase.
Why do you need to set them up in a RAID? Do you need the speed advantage? I would love to get the Raid card, but I read the price.Well you could always ante-up the $1000 for the RAID card and off-load the work, but...
I'm getting a Mac Pro for digital content conversion and storage (ripping DVDs and CDs and converting all my downloaded videos) to feed to an
Not really, but it does offer me a bit more speed then setting it up as a spanned JBOD ("Just a Box of Discs") while giving me the same advantage of treating it as a single 2TB HDD.
I have a Refurb Mac Pro 3.0GHz on the way, my two new Hard Drives just came in the mail today from newegg, I have not installed them or tried them out yet, as I don't have the machine...
It took a long time for me to decide which path to go with getting HDs, but I tried to go with something that would give me the most "bang for my buck" -- those Terabyte HDs are still EXPENSIVE, and so is the Raptor 150GB...
I figured that two additional hard drives (in addition to the stock 1 pre-installed) would be the best way to go, to give me three. I ended up deciding on two Western Digital 500GB drives, for about $94 each, not a bad deal.
I plan to run my Leopard OS and system on one, install Tiger on another as backup, and use this one for media files, video, downloads, and music...projects, etc...
Then use the other one for Windows XP -- partition and use half as a bootcamp 250GB drive, install games and Windows programs on that...then use the other partition for Parallels and Fusion Hard Drive images, and other miscellaneous backup...
TOTAL - 1.35TB of hard disk space, 3 drives, less than $200 to add them. Not bad.
It took a long time for me to decide which path to go with getting HDs, but I tried to go with something that would give me the most "bang for my buck" -- those Terabyte HDs are still EXPENSIVE, and so is the Raptor 150GB...
I figured that two additional hard drives (in addition to the stock 1 pre-installed) would be the best way to go, to give me three. I ended up deciding on two Western Digital 500GB drives, for about $94 each, not a bad deal.
I plan to run my Leopard OS and system on one, install Tiger on another as backup, and use this one for media files, video, downloads, and music...projects, etc...
Then use the other one for Windows XP -- partition and use half as a bootcamp 250GB drive, install games and Windows programs on that...then use the other partition for Parallels and Fusion Hard Drive images, and other miscellaneous backup...
TOTAL - 1.35TB of hard disk space, 3 drives, less than $200 to add them. Not bad.
Sounds like a good plan. I may go for similar, but I would prefer 1Tb drives for the future. The stock drive is terrible though, it is fairly noisy and pretty slow.
I just received my 1tb seagate barracuda the NS model not AS and its very very nice and performs very well! 
I am planning on getting either the Hitachi or the Seagate for thee 1Tb drives. I am still undecided on the Raptor. Are there any Raptor owners here>I just received my 1tb seagate barracuda the NS model not AS and its very very nice and performs very well!
Is this drive compatible w/ the mac Pro? http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=301 WD's site says Mac OS X supports EIDE not SATA. Is that right?
Well, Apple does use SATA drives now for all their machines, but different variants.
Mac Pros use SATA II 3gb/sec drives
Mac Pros use SATA II 3gb/sec drives
Well, you will remember the days of SCSI. There were all different types of SCSI drives, ranging from SCSI 1 or SCSI 2 and Ultra-SCSI 3 (which had a different connector) - and you had to make sure you got the right kind of internal hard drive for your machine.
True, but lucky for us SATA II is backwards and frontwards compatible. Modern Technology kicks ass.
