MacPro 5.1 & high capacity hard drives

[MarkC426]

Basic question:
I am upgrading my iTunes drive to 4tb.

Seems up to 2tb a barracuda is 7200/256, above it is 5400 unless you go pro which is double the price.
My 1tb drives have all been 7200, is there much difference purely for iTunes storage/playback.

 

[kohlson]

is there much difference purely for iTunes storage/playback.

I wouldn't think so. I use an 8TB Seagate USB-3 connected to a PCIe USB3 card in my 4/5,1. I sometime work directly on FCPX project from this disk, and other times play some music files through iTunes on this disk. Works as expected - just fine.

FWIW, the large disks in USB3 enclosures are typically much cheaper than raw drives. Some will "shuck" them to get the drive out and put into a case. If you choose that path, be sure to google "shuck" and the drive model number to see if there are any issues. Some manufacturers have modified their interface to prevent connecting a SATA interface on these drives, for example.

 

[AidenShaw]

Some will "shuck" them to get the drive out and put into a case

Shucking also voids the warranty.

 

[MarkC426]

Yeah, I would just get a standard sled drive myself.

 

[bsbeamer]

Most 5400rpm SATA drives can still get ~100MB/s or more. If you're working with iTunes audio that needs more speed than that, you should be using ProTools or Logic.

 

[MarkC426]

This is purely music/film purchases playback.
I will probably get the 7200 just because....

 

[kohlson]

Shucking also voids the warranty.

Usually ends up destroying the case, too (which I can only assume really voids the warranty!)

 

[CaliforniaDreamin]

Today, I shucked a WD Easystore 8TB unit. I was very smooth with the shucking and I'm sure I'll be able to snap it back into place to return it. I do believe I should return it based on the following:

Pre-shuck, I installed DriveDX on my MBP and hooked up the Easystore unit externally. It listed it as a HDD 5400rpm. Obviously, I want 7200. However, it does have a 256MB cache and not the 128, so that is good. But I'm assuming the overall speed is not what I want. The plan was to put this in my cMP 5,1 for now and then transplant it to a NAS unit once I get one in a few weeks or a couple of months.

The packaging of the unit listed DCM: MGBJVCP, which points to the model WD80EMAZ-00WJTA0. The EMAZ type was confirmed with DriveDX and the sticker on the drive once shucked. I went ahead with the shucking even after believing EMAZ was in it because tutorials looked simple enough and I had confidence that I could shuck it without damage in a short time. I was right.

The model on the box sticker was WDBCKA0080HBK-NESN. The NESN was promising, but did not yield the WD80EFAX "red label". Mine was a white label.

My understanding also is that there is possibly a 3.3v mod on this drive which can impede the computer's ability to recognize that the drive is even there. I want to avoid this. Needless to say, I will be reassembling this and returning it to Best Buy and trying again with other ones they have on the shelf.

Anyone have recent experience with this or any thoughts or hints? Thank you.

 

[krakman]

Today, I shucked a WD Easystore 8TB unit. I was very smooth with the shucking and I'm sure I'll be able to snap it back into place to return it. I do believe I should return it based on the following:

Pre-shuck, I installed DriveDX on my MBP and hooked up the Easystore unit externally. It listed it as a HDD 5400rpm. Obviously, I want 7200. However, it does have a 256MB cache and not the 128, so that is good. But I'm assuming the overall speed is not what I want. The plan was to put this in my cMP 5,1 for now and then transplant it to a NAS unit once I get one in a few weeks or a couple of months.

The packaging of the unit listed DCM: MGBJVCP, which points to the model WD80EMAZ-00WJTA0. The EMAZ type was confirmed with DriveDX and the sticker on the drive once shucked. I went ahead with the shucking even after believing EMAZ was in it because tutorials looked simple enough and I had confidence that I could shuck it without damage in a short time. I was right.

The model on the box sticker was WDBCKA0080HBK-NESN. The NESN was promising, but did not yield the WD80EFAX "red label". Mine was a white label.

My understanding also is that there is possibly a 3.3v mod on this drive which can impede the computer's ability to recognize that the drive is even there. I want to avoid this. Needless to say, I will be reassembling this and returning it to Best Buy and trying again with other ones they have on the shelf.

Anyone have recent experience with this or any thoughts or hints? Thank you.

Ive shucked several WD easystores recently and they have all been white drives.

In the mac pro you need to put tape over pin 3 and it wont automtatically mount on warm reboot unless you use mountain or jettison apps to control the drive.

Reports say that the drives work fine in newer NAS boxes which support the latest SATA protocol, which our old Mac Pros do not.

 

[CaliforniaDreamin]

Ive shucked several WD easystores recently and they have all been white drives.

In the mac pro you need to put tape over pin 3 and it wont automtatically mount on warm reboot unless you use mountain or jettison apps to control the drive.

Reports say that the drives work fine in newer NAS boxes which support the latest SATA protocol, which our old Mac Pros do not.

That’s not encouraging to hear all your recents shuck attempts have yielded whites. Aside from the 3.3v issue, won’t 5400 be too slow to have inside the cMP if I’m accessing the files for regular use? I’d imagine it would fare better as server or NAS usage.

I’ve also seen the articles and posts about that third pin. Also heard you can use a Molex connector as a “knockout” for that pin. Honestly, I want to set and forget a drive and be able to count on its dependability rather than being anxious it will load or work each time I use the machine.

Good to know it’s fine for NAS usage. In the meantime, I’m highly skeptical about putting it in the cMP and throwing a bunch of valuable data on it. Should I even bother trying to shuck a few more units from Best Buy? It was easy and smooth to do the first time.

 

[krakman]

That’s not encouraging to hear all your recents shuck attempts have yielded whites. Aside from the 3.3v issue, won’t 5400 be too slow to have inside the cMP if I’m accessing the files for regular use? I’d imagine it would fare better as server or NAS usage.

I’ve also seen the articles and posts about that third pin. Also heard you can use a Molex connector as a “knockout” for that pin. Honestly, I want to set and forget a drive and be able to count on its dependability rather than being anxious it will load or work each time I use the machine.

Good to know it’s fine for NAS usage. In the meantime, I’m highly skeptical about putting it in the cMP and throwing a bunch of valuable data on it. Should I even bother trying to shuck a few more units from Best Buy? It was easy and smooth to do the first time.

Im in the UK and all my drives came from Amazon. I guess WD supply hard drives in batches.

Initial shucking reports on the internet reported WD Red drives but recently i have only seen reports of white drives inside these USB enclosures.

Note: the 3 pin trick makes the drive appear on cold boot, if you do a warm reboot then the drive wont auto mount. So you need to use a bit of software to control this issue.

I use the 10TB drives as data store, it works fast enough for photo editing in lightroom, but for video i copy the project to SSD and then backup to the 10TB.

In my case I mount and unmount the drive as and when i need it. If you want the drive to mount and remount aitomatically then i suggest you look at an alternative drive or keep it in the enclosure and use it over USB.

 

[Plutonius]

Im in the UK and all my drives came from Amazon. I guess WD supply hard drives in batches.

Initial shucking reports on the internet reported WD Red drives but recently i have only seen reports of white drives inside these USB enclosures.

Note: the 3 pin trick makes the drive appear on cold boot, if you do a warm reboot then the drive wont auto mount. So you need to use a bit of software to control this issue.

I use the 10TB drives as data store, it works fast enough for photo editing in lightroom, but for video i copy the project to SSD and then backup to the 10TB.

In my case I mount and unmount the drive as and when i need it. If you want the drive to mount and remount aitomatically then i suggest you look at an alternative drive or keep it in the enclosure and use it over USB.

Why worry about using WD drives when you can use another brand without the cold / warm boot issues ?

 

[MacUser2525]

The 5400 rpm drives are more than enough for the MacPro they will easily do 100mb/s when transferring the data. That is pretty much the max speed it will support. I have used them for years in smaller sizes, 4tb, they work flawlessly. Oh and the reason to worry about the manufacturer is reliability never again for Seagate and their garbage. It is the only manufacturer where I have had a 100% failure rate of drives purchased. First it was updating the firmware on all those 10 or so drives for a data loss bug, then one after another one dying. A few of my WD drives from that time that replaced the garbage have died but the vast majority of them still survive and run to this day.

 

[Ted13]

Yes, I can confirm IronWolf is the same and works fine with the OWC sled. So far, so good.

Also - further good news - Seagate Ironwolf drive (mine is 10TB NAS) - the warm reboot works fine. Tempted to replace my other Western Digital Ultrastar with an Ironwolf to get rid of the warm reboot problem.

 

[BobD2]

I've read this entire thread because I have a similar issue. I have a mid-2010 MacPro (5,1) with a Samsung 500 GB SSD dedicated to system and applications, and 3 4TB HSGT drives. Everything mounts and works well with a cold start. Upon restart, as reported by others, one of the HSGT drives does not mount. The other two do. So far as I can tell, they are the same model (although the problem disk model number, ending in 614, is different from the other two):

HSGT HDN726040ALE614 (Device name in Disk Utility: "disk 4")
HGST HDN724040ALE640 ("disk 2")
HGST HDN724040ALE640 ("disk 1")

Upon restart, it is the first in this list that does not mount. This was purchased on 9/8/2017 (still under warranty). The other two were purchased in 2015 and 2016.

I reported this to OWC on Oct. 14 of this year (I had been living with this issue for quite some time at this point) to see if they had any comment. After some back-and-forth clarification (the OWC tech initially did not understand what I was saying) I got this response:

" I'm unaware of the issue with these drives that you are describing at this time, so I am glad you were able to point me to that.

With that being said, the first two drives are no longer under warranty, and while the third drive is under warranty, it's a drive that we longer carry. In fact, we don't carry many of the HGST drives at all anymore at this time.

I would point out the following as a solution for replacing the drives: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Toshiba/MG04ACA400E/

This drive also carries a 5 year warranty with it, which is a great choice in cases like this. I'm unaware of this specific drive having the issue that you are describing at this time."

It is somewhat curious that they continue to claim unawareness of this issue. In any case, I will eventually try the recommended Toshiba drive and see what happens.

 

[machinesworking]

Hi, I just posted a thread because after replacing my failing Seagate 2TB drive with a 4TB WD Black drive I'm experiencing the cold start sometimes working, warm reboot issue. I though it was something else but I'm understating that WD have an aggressive power down feature that's removing the drive from service altogether from what I read here.
I'm seeing a pattern with drives that work, it seems "Enterprise" models, whether Toshiba or Seagate work with no issue. Too bad about Western Digital, I foolishly went with them, even after talking to a friend who used to work in QA for Apple HQ, who was recommend the Seagate Exos line by a hard drive specialist at Apple. Apple have an easy out on this BTW, 8TB is the limit Apple put on capacity across all 4 bays, i.e. 2TB per bay.

 

[CaliforniaDreamin]

Hi, I just posted a thread because after replacing my failing Seagate 2TB drive with a 4TB WD Black drive I'm experiencing the cold start sometimes working, warm reboot issue. I though it was something else but I'm understating that WD have an aggressive power down feature that's removing the drive from service altogether from what I read here.
I'm seeing a pattern with drives that work, it seems "Enterprise" models, whether Toshiba or Seagate work with no issue. Too bad about Western Digital, I foolishly went with them, even after talking to a friend who used to work in QA for Apple HQ, who was recommend the Seagate Exos line by a hard drive specialist at Apple. Apple have an easy out on this BTW, 8TB is the limit Apple put on capacity across all 4 bays, i.e. 2TB per bay.

Can you elaborate on this “limit” with Apple hard drives in the cMP? Are you meaning that drives in excess of 2TB per bay fundamentally have issues with these machines?

 

[machinesworking]

Can you elaborate on this “limit” with Apple hard drives in the cMP? Are you meaning that drives in excess of 2TB per bay fundamentally have issues with these machines?

In the official page on the 2009 Mac Pros it states that the 4 bays can handle a total of 8TB, but a lot of people including myself have done fine with larger than 2TB drives. Currently I have a 5TB Hitachi I believe HD in a bay with no issues. I was just saying that anything over 2TB is not officially supported.

 

[CaliforniaDreamin]

In the official page on the 2009 Mac Pros it states that the 4 bays can handle a total of 8TB, but a lot of people including myself have done fine with larger than 2TB drives. Currently I have a 5TB Hitachi I believe HD in a bay with no issues. I was just saying that anything over 2TB is not officially supported.

Thanks for clarifying. So it’s more like the cases where Macs can accommodate double the RAM than Apple says? I’m possibly putting in an 8TB drive or two in my cMP but can opt instead for high capacity storage in a NAS if the cMP isn’t going to treat it right.

 

[krakman]

I have a 10tb + 6tb + 5TB + 1TB = 22TB across the 4 HD bays in addition to 3TB SSD raid on a PCI slot and another 1TB SSD boot drive on another PCI slot.

I think the guidelines were published back nearly 10 years a go when 2TB HDD was the Largest capacity drive that was made.

 

[macguru9999]

6TB seagate drives work fine, I have 2 of them. They even have the same screw hole arrangement as the older drives. I see no reason the 8tb seagates should work just as well. not sure about the holes, some bigger drives require a slightly different caddy. So a blade boot drive and at least 32gb in the trays should be ok....

 

[Ted13]

In the official page on the 2009 Mac Pros it states that the 4 bays can handle a total of 8TB, but a lot of people including myself have done fine with larger than 2TB drives. Currently I have a 5TB Hitachi I believe HD in a bay with no issues. I was just saying that anything over 2TB is not officially supported.

This is just what actually existed in 2009. It is now 2019 - of course you can use 16TB drives simply because they now exist, for a total of 64TB in all 4 bays. You could add other drives like SSDs in the PCIe slots (my boot drive on my 2009 MacPro is a PCIe SSD bought from OWC - my spinning HDs I get from Amazon).
This why the cheese grater MacPros are so loved and valuable: the SSDs, didn't even exist in 2009, the Blu-ray replacements for DVD drives didn't exist, etc. etc. but all these new things work just fine.

I am hoping that the new 2019 cheese grater MacPros will be as reliable and as easily and long lived upgradable justifying spending a boatload of money to get one. My 2009 Mac Pro cost like $2K. Best investment ever made. Hopefully the three times more expensive 2019 version will last as long...

 

[AmbroseM]

Another data point;

I have an ancient Mac Pro 4.1 on OSX 10.11.6.

I have tried two HTSG 6Tb Helium drives:
HGST HUH728060ALE600 PN OF23269 Firmware: A4GNT514 - Does =not= mount on warm-start and does mount on cold start when installed internally, and works fine for both when installed externally.
HGST HUS726060ALA640 PN OF18335 Firmware: AHGNT1EN - works fine internally and externally.

The main difference between the specifications of these two is the one that works has a 64Mb cache and the one that does =not= mount on restart has a 128Mb cache.

See my post with more details here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/weird-drive-issue.2213327/

 

[mrt209]

Have been using WD60EZRZ drives, happy with them, was going to buy another but seems they have been replaced with WD60EZAZ which are SMR drives. The WD Reds also seem to be SMR drives now.

From reading different forums most people advice against using SMR drives. I will be using the drive for media storage.

Has anyone tried any of these WD drives? Any issues?

WD80EFAX (WD Red 8TB - SMR)
WD60EZAZ (WD Blue 6TB - SMR)
WD6003FRYZ (WD Gold 6TB - PMR)
DC HC320 (8TB Ultrastar DC - PMR)


I know some people have reported on the old versions but haven't seen on the newer models. Some reviews I found said the warm boot issue was fixed and others say it's still a problem so confused.


Don't care about speed, mainly reliability.

Thanks

 

[Taipan]

You can get a demo version free of charge. It works for 30 min then quits i think the website is app engineers .de

In the advanced prefs of the app you click on the desired HD and select 'do not mount on boot'

So on boot/reboot the HD does not automatically mount on the desktop. You need to click on the Mountain app icon in the menubar and from the dropdown menu you can select your hard drive and mount it.

This works for my WD10 TB HD i use it as a data drive so i kust mount it when i need it.

I also tried an app called jettison which works more or less the same.

Can it be scripted?