What should I do with my mac?

[category]

hello

My mac pro hard drive got laggy and it crashes & takes like 10 minutes to load!!! Worst of all it sometimes doesn't load at all gives me a black screen with errors I guess its sort of like a blue screen of death for windows. Anyways I tried cleaning the hard drive optimizing and it doesn't work I only have 37GB available because I do a lot of video editing. I have a basic set up of mac pro with 1gig of ram etc etc. I still have the warranty I dont know though should i send it to apple? I dont want to pay for a new hard drive, since i still have the warranty. I dont think my hard drive over heated because its pretty cool here but i might be wrong. I have 37gb left out of 250GB. Also where can I buy mac pro hard drives? I think I need the 750GB. Anyways I need some kind of advice of what to do because i do a lot of video editing and when i start to do video editing lately it just takes forever. However the hard drive is running fine without giving it any kind of work, however when doing multiple taks sometimes it freezes. Also I need to purchase new ram I guess 1 gig inst enough but apple mac pro ram is sooo expensive i need atleast 2gb. Is it possible that my hard drive started to crash because i have only 1gb of ram and i put a lot of work to it? Also if I send it to apple will they erase my hard drive or should i erase my hard drive for safety???

Thanks!

 

[0007776]

I think that since you have the warrenty send it to Apple and they should replace it for you, or they may just mail you a new HD if they consider it a user replacable part.

 

[deux-ex-mak]

Dedicated HD, more RAM

Sounds like you're using a single HD, where the OS, applications and media are stored. This is a mistake out of the book: you should have a dedicated, fast and reliable HD -if not a raid system, for your A/V media, no matter how powerful your machine is.

Also, 1 GB of RAM doesn't help: you're going to run out quickly and therefore force the system to use the HD as virtual memory. I'd say 2 Gb of RAM would be a minimum for the job, 4 Gb widely reported in mac rumors as the figure from which the machine starts to fly.

 

[velocityg4]

First off if it is crashing at startup back up your data.

Now since it is under warranty I would bring it in to be checked out at a local Applestore. Even if it is the hard drive and you want a bigger one they can replace the broken one which you can use as a scratch disk.

As for your other questions.

750GB are pretty pricey for what you get. For the price of a single 750GB drive you could almost buy two 500GB drives and run them in RAID 0 giving you much better performance with large video file encoding and saving. Though you would need a solid backup plan.

500GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145137

If you still want to go the 750GB route this one from Western Digital just got good reviews from Tomshardwareguide.com and is uber fast.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136131

As for memory all of these are reviewed by customers as Mac Pro compatible

1GB Module
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134085

2GB Module
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134086