Recommend 10,000 RPM drives for Mac Pro trays?

[Sean Dempsey]

I just bought my Mac Pro, with just the standard 250 gig hard drive. That's plenty of space for me, but I would like to add 1 or 2 10,000 rpm drives for photoshop scratch discs and such.

What are some tested, and reliable 10k drives I could look into that would slap right into the macpro drive trays? Speed is my goal, not size. Right now, after 4 years on this old PC, I've got about 100-150 gigs of storage used up. I am not a packrat with music and movies. It just work files (I'm a web developer, graphic artist). But I looooooove speed, so 10k drives are really desired.

I have heard that the larger the drive, the faster it will run, but I've never owned a 10k drive before so I am not sure.

Thanks for the input.

 

[LeviG]

western digital raptors are the only 10k drives for sata at the moment. Benchmarks are putting the raptors only slightly ahead of the current crop of perpendicular drives though.

If the mac pro supports sas drives then there are others but they are pricey.

If you want quicker access times to files, it may be worth considering some of the new solid state drives.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

western digital raptors are the only 10k drives for sata at the moment. Benchmarks are putting the raptors only slightly ahead of the current crop of perpendicular drives though.

If the mac pro supports sas drives then there are others but they are pricey.

If you want quicker access times to files, it may be worth considering some of the new solid state drives.

I mainly want it for the photoshop(and others) scratch disks. Maybe 7200 is fine, but I really want that extra oomph. I don't think I need quite as much oomph as a solid state drive has though.

There's gotta be some photoshop professionals that have some extra scratch disks, what do you use?

 

[Blue Velvet]

There's gotta be some photoshop professionals that have some extra scratch disks, what do you use?

We use 40gb Raptors at work in our dual G5s solely for dedicated scratch disks for both Illustrator and Photoshop and when they went in about 3 years ago, they felt noticeably quicker. But now I'm used to having them in there and I'm not sure whether the improvement was worth it in the longer run... however, it wasn't my money that paid for them.

 

[MRU]

I bought a 150gb SATA Raptor X drive for my mac pro.

Yes it makes boot time a little faster, but difference in opening apps was negligable, and once the app was open, photoshop felt no different.

So I sold the raptor and bought a 750gb 7200 WD drive instead.

Has no real major difference speedwise from the raptor for me in day to day operation of photoshop, illustrator or painter (my main daily apps) but gives me huge storage, a much better benefit overall I've found.

 

[Apple Corps]

I would suggest that you go for one of the latest SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 drives that are just now starting to ship. My Mac Pro has a 150 GB Raptor as the boot drive. The new PR drives @ 7200 rpm (ESPECIALLY with the SAMSUNG 340 GB per platter density) now just about match the Raptor in performance with much less heat and noise.

Check out details at STORAGEREVIEW.com