WD6400AAKS or HD103UJ HDDs for Mac Pro?

[Semiopaque]

OK , so there's a bunch of threads about hard drive choices, I think I've read them all, but I'm just hoping for some validation on my next decision and would like some current opinions.

I'm choosing between 2 x SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB or 3 x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB, will run them in RAID 0.

Looking to use this for CS3 apps, Logic and possibly down the road FCP.

Quick is important, but quiet is also on par with quick.

I'm leaning towards the WD drives. I already have one Samsung I am using in an enclosure for storing media on a PC and it's super nice, quiet and cool but I am thinking 3 of the WDs will be faster in RAID for me in my Mac.

Anyone who has have either or both of these for awhile or any comments would be helpful. Read a ton of reviews and still I'm torn on this...

 

[bytodaystandrds]

Mate, I went through the same HD upgrade options for my iMac couple months ago...

First you should know that noise refers to 2 different things:1) moving parts inside the drive(motors, heads) and 2) vibration from the platters.
This means that a given drive may indeed be quiet but produce vibrations that will transfer through your Mac's case and drive you crazy!

Both of the models you came up with have dense enough platters (~320GB/each) to ensure top performance. Some say the WD6400AAKS with a ~80GB partition as a system startup reaches Raptor performance levels...

Now, from my experience with those drives I can say that they both perform really fast!!
The Samsung is quiet but you may end up taking it back several times until you get one with no vibration... My 1st F1 was vibrating like no other... for me, that was an unusable HD.
Finally, my 2nd sample found it's place in a Lacie d2 case I wanted to upgrade for some time now.

The WD6400AAKS is the drive I decided to put in the iMac.
I got almost zero vibration and head noise along with low operational temperature.
And the performance really is mindblowing- sometimes i thing it's an SSD in there reaching data so fast and so quiet!
+ it's so much cheaper- it must have been the HD industry best kept secret..

Given you are upgrading a Mac Pro, i suggest you to get the WD6400AAKS for startup and the Samsung as scratch disk- loops- video- media disk.

Oops!.. RAID he said:
I think using 2 drives is less noisy than 3...? Also less chances to get a lemon drive.
I say, go for the 2 samsungs, then...

Good luck

 

[Mr.Noisy]

Quick & quiet use the WD6400AAKS (or WD7500AAKS)
I use Western Digital AAKS drives, 2 in a raid config for CS3 (photography projects) and one for multimedia stuff, video encodes and stuff, never been let down and quiet, I'm happy with them for Pro and personal use , I'm sure you'll be happy with them too
for the last Last 2 day's starting wednesday been running none stop doing video encoding, no noise, sweet

 

[Semiopaque]

Thanks for the info. I think I'm going to take your first advice and go with the WD6400AAKS s, mainly due to the potential quietness of the drives. I think the WD has 2 platters while the Samsung has 3 (mainly because the Samsung is bigger, pretty sure the Samsung has slightly higher density), which I'm hoping will be quiter and help increase longevity. Plus, the fact that I can get the 3 WDs slightly cheaper (very slightly).

I'm also going to get another Samsung and stick it in another enclosure for backing up my media, so if the WDs don't work out too well, I can switch.

Again, appreciate your reply. Your comment about temperature was very helpful as I will be running these in a room that can get a bit warm in the summers.

The Samsung I have seems to run pretty cool (the enclosure it's in never got much above room temperature during formatting, checking the disk for errors or moving around 50 GB of data into - not sure on moving stuff out yet, though).