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slow hard drives on New Mac Pros?

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macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 5, 2007
728
474
Toronto, Canada
Like so many here I'm still patiently waiting for my new Mac Pro with 8800GT
but today I saw an article on HardMac
claiming that the default 320GB hard drives are 30% slower than some user-installed 3rd party hard drives. Can somebody who has their Mac Pros already either confirm or deny this?
 
I'm going to use a WD 500GB Caviar as my system and apps disk, 2 X 320GB identical Seagate Barracudas in RAID 0 for my video editing files, and the stock 320GB (whoever makes it, might be Seagate, might be WD) as internal storage for archiving. I don't intend to use Time Machine.
 
i have the stock 2.8 octo and my 320 GB HD is a WD SE 3200AAJS with an 8 MB cache....the drive seems pretty slow...i've ordered two Samsung Spinpoint F1 750 GB with 32 MB cache and will have them installed whenever newegg gets them to me (hopefully monday or tuesday) and i'll let you know if there is improved performance
 
My Octo was delivered about an hour ago, and it also came with a wd se 3200AAJS. It's now been moved to slot 3, with a samsung highpoint as my #1 drive and a wd se16 as a archive drive

fridgeymonster3 said:
i have the stock 2.8 octo and my 320 GB HD is a WD SE 3200AAJS with an 8 MB cache....the drive seems pretty slow...i've ordered two Samsung Spinpoint F1 750 GB with 32 MB cache and will have them installed whenever newegg gets them to me (hopefully monday or tuesday) and i'll let you know if there is improved performance
Click to expand...
 
noticeably slower here also, I jumped from a 2.8ghz imac with 4gig ram and the drive appeared quicker at loading apps to me.

I am carbon cloning my drive over to a temp drive and then doing a software raid 0 on the stock drive together with a maxtor diamondmax 21 320gb (its the only other 320gb drive I have but luckily enough the specs are just about identical to the stock WD)
 
I've read similar things at Barefeats, although I can't find the article anymore... Does anyone know if this applies to the specific Seagate 320, or is this a general issue with the Seagate Barracuda line? I have little experience buying my own hard drives and their the only ones I have experience with.
 
Thiol said:
I've read similar things at Barefeats, although I can't find the article anymore... Does anyone know if this applies to the specific Seagate 320, or is this a general issue with the Seagate Barracuda line? I have little experience buying my own hard drives and their the only ones I have experience with.
Click to expand...

Good question. And thanks to everyone for the feedback. I guess I'll use the stock 320 hard drive for backups and move my primary system to a different drive. Also could someone explain what might be making those drives slower? I thought the speed of a drive only depends on the interface type, the spin speed and the cache size. Is there more to it than that?
 
for one thing the 8 mb cache pretty pathetic for the price of the mac pro...most 320 gb drives i think have a 16 gb cache that makes some difference...you should go with the Samsung SpinPoint F1's (either 1TB or 750 with the 32 GB cache) or go with the 7200.11 Seagate Barracuda with 32 MB cache (i think either 500, 750 & 1TB have 32 cache)...all of those will be pretty fast and are very cheap on newegg in comparison to the apple drives
 
The 320GB WD seems fast enough to me. I think a lot of people on this forum have the tendency to want to max out their machine before they even try it to know if it's fast enough as is.

I was tempted to buy all this extra RAM before I even used my new 2.8 octo, but truth is 2GB is good enough for me right now. I don't need all my editing/graphics apps to run at once. I'm not saying 2GB is enough for everyone, I'm just saying try it out for yourself and decide before spending another $1K on upgrades.
 
fridgeymonster3 said:
for one thing the 8 mb cache pretty pathetic for the price of the mac pro...most 320 gb drives i think have a 16 gb cache that makes some difference...you should go with the Samsung SpinPoint F1's (either 1TB or 750 with the 32 GB cache) or go with the 7200.11 Seagate Barracuda with 32 MB cache (i think either 500, 750 & 1TB have 32 cache)...all of those will be pretty fast and are very cheap on newegg in comparison to the apple drives
Click to expand...

I have a 750gb Spinpoint on its way to me and I was going to use this as the boot drive although now i am copying everything across to the new software raid of the stock 320gb and another 320gb that I had spare.

Now I wonder which will be quicker? Gut straight away says software raid although surely the spinpoint wont be far behind?
 
zdobson said:
The 320GB WD seems fast enough to me. I think a lot of people on this forum have the tendency to want to max out their machine before they even try it to know if it's fast enough as is.

I was tempted to buy all this extra RAM before I even used my new 2.8 octo, but truth is 2GB is good enough for me right now. I don't need all my editing/graphics apps to run at once. I'm not saying 2GB is enough for everyone, I'm just saying try it out for yourself and decide before spending another $1K on upgrades.
Click to expand...

I agree I have been using my stock 2.8 octo to see the performance. I feel the drive is sluggish, but I need more HD space anyway so an upgrade is an obvious choice but I would suggest that people who have not had the mac pro or ever had problems with HD just test your system for a week or two
 
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