Mac Pro Hard Drives: Recommendations?

[CPPhoto]

Ive searched through the forum to look up which are best but it gave some vague info.

The mac pro is being used first for school, and then secondly for pro photography work (aperture, CS3, DPP, etc)

whats my best hard drive situation??

It came with the stock 250 gb drive.

I guess the best thing to do would keep my apps and the OS on one drive, then have photos and design work on other drives? or whats best?

any brand names, specific drives, etc would be helpful.

also id like to keep the noise pretty low as well...and also the price!!!

thanks!

 

[iBookG4user]

Seagate is a very good brand with a great 5 year warranty, Frys usually has fantastic deals on hard drives. So you might want to check the hard drives here.

 

[Toknee]

I have a WD Raptop 150GB 10,000rpm system drive, a 2nd Raptor, and then a Hitachi 500GB for storage in the 3rd slot.

There is a decent increase in performance with the 10K raptors as a system drive.

 

[Umbongo]

Ive searched through the forum to look up which are best but it gave some vague info.

The mac pro is being used first for school, and then secondly for pro photography work (aperture, CS3, DPP, etc)

whats my best hard drive situation??

It came with the stock 250 gb drive.

I guess the best thing to do would keep my apps and the OS on one drive, then have photos and design work on other drives? or whats best?

any brand names, specific drives, etc would be helpful.

also id like to keep the noise pretty low as well...and also the price!!!

thanks!

Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung are three brands I'd reccomend you choose from. Seagate tend to have the best performance, but have the loudest hard drives. Samsung spinpoint T166 hard drives are the quietest and are often used by those seeking silent machines. You'll want a SATA drive of course. Newegg have good pricing mostly, but use product search sites or look locally if you like.

 

[CPPhoto]

what would i put on the system drive. OSX, apps, and thats it?

 

[Evergreen]

What I like to do is have two drives of the same size backing up each other. Divide each into two partitions, and have system/apps on one, then the user folder and other files on the second drive; the spare partition acts as an exact mirror of the other drive, so if you have a crash, the data is ready for immediate use. You could buy a Raptor and use it as a scratch disk.

 

[jasonwang99]

I have the stock 250 GB drive as my applications drive and my data spread across a RAID 10 using the three remaining slots plus another drive in the second optical bay. This way, I don't have to worry about backing up all the time. Instead, I backup periodically to DVD and store those off site.

Link here:

Also, I've made an "image" of the system drive on the RAID 10 so it would be easy to restore it if necessary. At least that's the theory.

 

[CPPhoto]

so if i did bay 1 the stock 250 for osx and apps, and then say 2 for photos, 3 for a backup? and for for _______??


what are peoples setups on here

 

[dkoralek]

so if i did bay 1 the stock 250 for osx and apps, and then say 2 for photos, 3 for a backup? and for for _______??


what are peoples setups on here

I have a 500 for system and apps, a 160 for windows, and two 500s for data, photos, music, etc. plus two 250 externals from before for backup, etc. mainly do some computationally intensive (but not data intensive) work, so I haven't bothered to raid the drives. I have both WD and Seagate drives with no problems with either.

cheers.

 

[pnyc]

These are great Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 for size/performance combo.

 

[CPPhoto]

thanks for the help thus far...but to comment on the last post... i once heard the deskstars referred to as "deathstars"

thoughts?

 

[slughead]

thanks for the help thus far...but to comment on the last post... i once heard the deskstars referred to as "deathstars"

thoughts?

It means nothing.

Google tested thousands of hard drives from all sorts of different manufacturers, IBM/Hitachis did not have higher failure rates.

Basically, people post about faulty drives all the time. 'Deathstar' is a catchy name and sticks with people.

A long time ago, IBM released a 75GB drive which had a ~5% failure rate. That was a one time thing though.

 

[CanadaRAM]

IN general, you get better performance if you can split your Data, System, Applications and Scratch disk space, onto separate drives, so each function can have a separate set of heads reading and writing it -- this minimizes time lost to head seeking.

(Partitioning one drive is NOT an effective way to do this.)

If you partition drives, keep in mind that the First partition you create is the fastest part of the drive, as you work your way in, the data transfer gets slower and slower. So, if you have a 500 Gb drive you want to use as a scratch disk, partition it, say, 100 Gb / 400 Gb, put the scratch in the 100 Gb partition, and use the slower partition as a place for backups of other drives and archival material that seldom gets accessed.