Western Digital VelociRaptor on mac pros?

[hugodrax]

Anyone mount one of those beasts? Maxupgrades sell a package with the 300GB WD VelociRaptor 2.5 inch Disk Drive with MaxConnect VR kit for Mac [2006-2008] Pro Internal Drive Bays WD3000BLFS unit.

I noticed that the real bottle neck is the DASD and would like to know how much of a difference this drive will do compared to 7200 RPM 1TB drives 32mb cache.

Maybe getting two for Raid 0 and use an external drive I have for time machine to provide security of data.

Is it worth running in raid 0 software? or just one drive is enough.

 

[Zerozal]

Yup...I believe there are a bunch of us that have Velociraptors in our MPs. I use mine as the system/boot/application disk, and save my Raid 0 array for working space, Lightroom, photo storage, etc.. Details in my sig. The Velociraptor works perfectly--no complaints.

 

[alphaod]

I have 4 VelociRaptors in RAID5 and it works great, but I find it hard to recommend it due to the poor price per GB, especially when the 2TB drives are cheaper, offer more than 7x the capacity, and almost as fast in terms of sequential access (and quite close in random as well).

It might be worth waiting for an updated model from Western Digital or maybe consider a SSD.

 

[300D]

VelociRaptors are old tech, many 7200rpm 2TB drives can easily keep up with it. Look into an SSD or wait for the next revision.

 

[pprior]

Anyone mount one of those beasts? Maxupgrades sell a package with the 300GB WD VelociRaptor 2.5 inch Disk Drive with MaxConnect VR kit for Mac [2006-2008] Pro Internal Drive Bays WD3000BLFS unit.

I noticed that the real bottle neck is the DASD and would like to know how much of a difference this drive will do compared to 7200 RPM 1TB drives 32mb cache.

Maybe getting two for Raid 0 and use an external drive I have for time machine to provide security of data.

Is it worth running in raid 0 software? or just one drive is enough.

Umm, we've been using them for years now

As noted, many of the modern 1TB and up drive actually will have throughput higher than the raptor, but random access still rocks all over them, so for a boot or apps drive it's a nice choice.

Doesn't compare with a good SSD.

You don't state what your needs are, sure running 4 raptors in raid0 will be brutal fast, but stability will be much riskier and backup critical.