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What harddrives for the Mac Pro

Mr. Anderson

Mr. Anderson

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
I always find it a bit of a crap shoot getting new harddrives for my Macs - anyone had any recent info on what's available, what's good and what's bad?

I'm probably going to get at least a pair of 2 TB for my new MacPro

D
 
Heres what I have found, every company has a bad batch, and every company will always make some customers unhappy. Some like WD and not Seagate, and others the exact opposite. The fact is that all drives will crash at one point, and sometimes they can crash at random times, for ALL companies, not just some.

In my experiences, Western Digitals have lasted a while, along with Seagates. However, Hitachis didn't last as long. So I would suggest a WD or Seagate. My personal preference is WD, but everyone has different opinions.

If you are getting drives just for backup, go for WD Caviar Green or Seagate 5900 RPM drive. They run slower, but use less energy and don't get as hot. Otherwise, I would suggest a normal Seagate 7200 RPM drive or WD Caviar Black.
 
In the last 5 years I've probably bought over 30 WD hard drives. None of them has ever been DOA (always from Newegg) and never had one die yet. (Green, Blue and Black)

Agreed that every company will have bad batches, but I've only heard somewhat bad things about Seagate.
 
If you can afford it, go for one or two SSD's as your system drive. A couple of Sandforce controller based drives in RAID0 would be ideal. OCZ Vertex 2 are an example.

If not, get a couple of fast (7200RPM) drives with decent cache (32MB) and run those in RAID0. WD Black's are an example.

For backup, a slower (5400RPM) power efficient single drive is more than sufficient. WD Green's are an example.
 
VirtualRain said:
If you can afford it, go for one or two SSD's as your system drive. A couple of Sandforce controller based drives in RAID0 would be ideal. OCZ Vertex 2 are an example.

If not, get a couple of fast (7200RPM) drives with decent cache (32MB) and run those in RAID0. WD Black's are an example.

For backup, a slower (5400RPM) power efficient single drive is more than sufficient. WD Green's are an example.
Click to expand...

OCZ Vertex 2 and OWC SSDs both have the Sandforce controller.

WD Blacks are great drives, and the ones I got are 64MB cache which is nice
 
Don' get a Seagate. They are noisy and slow compared to other brands. I am a fan of Samsung. WD is a close second. And for gods sake DO NOT put a "Green Drive" as a main drive in a Mac Pro. They really aren't any quieter than a 7200 RPM drive and are much slower and the power savings are pretty negligible. I have two green drives, both used for mass storage, which they are perfect for, but as a boot drive, the random performance/ seek times are crap and really bog down the system.

I wouldn't advocate RAID either. If you dont know about it, chances are you dont need it either...
 
2x WD 1Tb Black
1x WD 1Tb Green
1x Hitachi 7K1000.B (Might be dying - unsure)
1x WD 300Gb Velociraptor
1x 1.5TB Samsung HD

Personally I will be buying WD again.
 
jav6454 said:
*click click click*

... that's all you hear from a Seagate drive. Then death.
Click to expand...

I concur! I have had the bad blocks / click of death happen to me starting with PowerComputing back in the mid 1990's. G5 again. Work computers.

All Seagate.
 
To keep costs down while maintaining good performance, I am going with a pair of 600GB WD Velociraptors as OS X and Win 7 boot drives, then I will be using a pair of 2TB WD RE4s for media storage and backups.
 
I've had nothing but bad experience with Seagate drives. Personally I'm a fan of WD for internal drives and LaCie for externals.
 
Like others have suggested, if you have the budget buy a SSD for the boot drive, and traditional HD's for storage. I would also move the "Home" folder to the standard HD and leave only the OS and Apps on the SSD.

As far as HD's go, I would stick with Western Digital over Seagate any day. Plenty of failed drives and horror stories to go with them, even the newer Barracuda drives.
 
As far as mechanical drives are concerned, I've had really good luck with WD drives lately. The Blacks are very solid drives if I need higher performance and the Greens do very well for mass-storage applications where speed isn't as important.

But like strausd mentioned before, there's no such thing as a perfect drive manufacturer. Every manufacturer has bad batches, which makes it all the more important to keep critical data properly backed up in the first place.
 
I ordered an ssd for boot, and was wondering, if it makes sense to move the user home dir onto the 2tb WD Green that I have, to store docs, pics, music and other media, will OSX be less responsive etc?
 
skiffx said:
I ordered an ssd for boot, and was wondering, if it makes sense to move the user home dir onto the 2tb WD Green that I have, to store docs, pics, music and other media, will OSX be less responsive etc?
Click to expand...

Yes it will. Whenever you need to access something in your home folder, it will run at a slower speed because it is a green drive. Also, it will take longer because the Caviar Green drives go to sleep more often if I remember correctly. I am putting my home folder on a Caviar Black and then backing it up to a Caviar Green.
 
strausd said:
Yes it will. Whenever you need to access something in your home folder, it will run at a slower speed because it is a green drive. Also, it will take longer because the Caviar Green drives go to sleep more often if I remember correctly. I am putting my home folder on a Caviar Black and then backing it up to a Caviar Green.
Click to expand...

How are caviar blacks with noise? I prefer next to silent systems (at least when they idle) so hence for going with green, but if blacks aren't too annoying I could possibly opt out for the same setup, black + green raid 1
Also if you use 2tb wd black, you should have any slow downs accessing data etc?
 
skiffx said:
How are caviar blacks with noise? I prefer next to silent systems (at least when they idle) so hence for going with green, but if blacks aren't too annoying I could possibly opt out for the same setup, black + green raid 1
Click to expand...

Wouldn't make any sense in terms of noise. Even a single Black totally destroys the dream of a silent computer.

I once had 3 Blacks in my Pro which I exchanged with Green drives after a short time. Personally, I found the Blacks to be much too noisy.

Got 4 Greens plus a SSD in my system now and it is almost inaudible. 😀

The performance of large Green drives is totally acceptable for a data drive. My striped array of two 2TB Greens makes 200MB/s + read and write. A striped array of two 1TB Blacks isn't faster.

And no, the Green drives don't sleep faster. If you don't wanna have any beachballs while waiting for mechanical drives to spin up, simply uncheck the option in your system preferences. Do difference between Black and Green drives there.
 
Transporteur said:
Wouldn't make any sense in terms of noise. Even a single Black totally destroys the dream of a silent computer.

I once had 3 Blacks in my Pro which I exchanged with Green drives after a short time. Personally, I found the Blacks to be much too noisy.

Got 4 Greens plus a SSD in my system now and it is almost inaudible. 😀

The performance of large Green drives is totally acceptable for a data drive. My striped array of two 2TB Greens makes 200MB/s + read and write. A striped array of two 1TB Blacks isn't faster.

And no, the Green drives don't sleep faster. If you don't wanna have any beachballs while waiting for mechanical drives to spin up, simply uncheck the option in your system preferences. Do difference between Black and Green drives there.
Click to expand...

Hmm, yeh as long as it performs adequate accessing data that you dont perceive any 'lag'/beachballs I can live with that.
So if you get 4x2TB Greens + ssd you can do Raid 0 + 1 so you have speed increase + redundancy ?
 
got a pair of the WD 2GB Blacks - thanks!!

I'll probably replace the external drives with the WD Blacks as well - just have to make sure that I can.

D
 
Mr. Anderson said:
got a pair of the WD 2GB Blacks - thanks!!

I'll probably replace the external drives with the WD Blacks as well - just have to make sure that I can.
Click to expand...

Which external drives? If you wanna replace them with Blacks make sure that you've got at least an eSATA connection, otherwise the Black drives would be a complete waste of money.
 
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