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Mac Pro + 4x 1.5 TB HDD from Seagate?

Floris

Floris

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Sep 7, 2007
2,385
1,492
Netherlands
The page shows 4TB supported, but Seagate introduced SATA2 32MB 1.5 TB drives. I can't really seem to find anybody that goes 'yep, I have one of those, works fine'. So before we invest the extra bit of money for the extra bytes of storage, it is worth asking this fun community here on macrumors.

I currently have 4 internal drives, 250GB, 320GB, 750GB and 1024GB. And external a bunch of 320/500/1TB, but they won't matter. What I want to do is replace the 250/320 (and move them to external eSATA) and replace them with 2x 1.5 TB seagate drives.

Anybody have any experience with these drives, and if so .. do they work just fine with the mac pro? In theory they should support 16 TB because of the 64bit os. but hey .. seeing how the new mbp should support 8gb ram but doesn't. .. It doesn't hurt to ask.
 
The only reason Apple says 4 terabytes is because thats all they are offering as B.T.O., sometimes they fall behind with technology and don't add an option. I believe you can add 64 gigs of ram in the Mac Pro, not sure if that ram has been released yet.

You can use any Sata drive, from 1 gigabyte to whatever amount of terabytes it tops out at.

I'm repeating what the above poster said but it's alright.
 
Thank you guys for your input. We will now go read some reviews from prominent sites regarding the performance of these drives, and compare pricing over the 1tb alternatives. More space doesn't mean it is better by default. But it looks promising when you deal with screencasts, podcasts, sql backups, site mirroring, etc.
 
Floris said:
Thank you guys for your input. We will now go read some reviews from prominent sites regarding the performance of these drives, and compare pricing over the 1tb alternatives. More space doesn't mean it is better by default. But it looks promising when you deal with screencasts, podcasts, sql backups, site mirroring, etc.
Click to expand...

There's millions of different expansion options with the Mac Pro, it'll take years to max it all out.

I recommend (something i'm gonna do in the future) is to load up on these cheap terabyte drives, around $95 a piece, get E-Sata PCI Express cards and some enclosures and you can have a 7-8 terabyte setup for under $1000 (might be too low of a price but I'm sure it's possible).
 
mrwizardno2 said:
Just a note:

There are issues with those drives. Not necessarily because of their size, but because of the controller and the way they've implemented certain things (it will cause the system to hang at times). I'm searching for the link in their forums, I'll post it once I find it.

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board...&thread.id=2390&view=by_date_ascending&page=6

These problems are widespread across all OS's.
Click to expand...
Here's the thread you were looking for: Issue with Seagate 1.5TB?
Looks like the answer may have been found as well. ;)

Hope this helps. :)
 
Great information everybody. Thank you for taking the time to comment to my topic. We're looking into a cheaper solution to get better results, it seems that the terabyte drives internal + external is quite affordable and expandable and proven to be working. We would love to get a drobo as a backup, but just the box itself is quite expansive. I rather use that money to get 4 more 1tb drives to back up externally too. If anything fails, it's just one of the drives, and since it's backup data .. risk is low enough.

Once the projects are kicking off we can use funding to get drobo or whatever to ensure data security.
 
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