Purchasing an additional (2nd) SATA drive for G5

[agdickinson]

Hi,

I'm after buying a second SATA drive for my Mac. I purchased the standard G5 2 dual, with the 150Gb drive.

I was wondering what are recommended 150Gb or 250Gb drives that work well with the internal drive.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Merry Christmas to all.

Andrew
:O)

 

[Makosuke]

Well, any SATA drive should work as well as any other. The question is which one you want.

If ultimate speed is what you really want, you could get a WD Raptor (make sure it's one of the new ones) and use that for boot/basic data. They're small, though, and have a huge price for the size.

Personally, I went with a 160GB Hitachi to go with the stock 250GB Maxtor; the Hitachi drive is the fastest 7200RPM SATA drive (almost as fast as first gen Raptors, in fact), it's VERY quiet, and it runs relatively cool. Plus, they're priced reasonably, and Hitachi/IBM has had a pretty good reliability record recently. If you get the OEM version, it's also got a 3-year warranty.

Seagate's drives are so-so in speed, but very quiet, cool, and reliable. Unfortunately, their current SATA drives only have a 1-year warranty, so I didn't get one, and I wouldn't recommend it.

I wouldn't buy a Maxtor, personally--I've never heard anything good about their reliability, they run very hot, and the one I've got (again, stock Apple) is noisy by modern drive standards.

Don't know anything about WD's other SATA drives.

 

[Sun Baked]

Yes don't buy the Maxtor in the Red Boxes, at least buy some of their more reliable/longer warranty products (and yes they "may" exist in their near line offerings).

 

[tsk]

I don't know how much space you *need*.

As someone mentioned, the Raptor is one incredibly fast disk. It's pricey but worth it IMO ($260 for 73GB at newegg.com). I've installed 3 of these drives in various systems now and these are without a doubt the fastest drives I have every used (except some high end SCSI's).

Personally, I'd get a 73gb raptor and swap that in as the main system hd (this should give you a noticable speed increase in general use). Then put the 150GB as your secondary.

This of course assumes that you can 1) live with just 73gb and 2) want to spend a bunch of money for a cutting edge drive.