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Which hard drive for the Mac Pro?

P

parkie

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 31, 2007
56
0
I recently read an article about this on a web but it was written last year and a lot of newer drives obviously weren't included. What would you buy now for your mac pro. I've heard there are problems with the 320GB Seagate drives that have older firmware on them so I'm not sure about them. What have you got and how does it perform. What benchmark do you use?

cheers

p
 
I use 4WD RE 500s and have had no problems. They are quiet. My Mac Pro came with a 500 GB Seagate 7200/9 which was OK, but noisy. It's in an external box now, used for occasional clone back-ups.
 
I've only heard of some 750GB hard drives causing problems. I think it's been fixed. As noted, any SATA drive should do.
 
Depends a bit on how you intend to use the drives, but unless you've got some requirement for very fast (10K RPM) drives, any 3.5" SATA will work. I just put in two Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB drives (SATA 300, 16MB cache, 7200 RPM) that I got at Best Buy for $90 each. I use them only to back up my Leopard boot disk and my Vista boot disk, respectively.
 
I want to buy a 1 Terabyte drive for my Mac Pro. OWC seems to have good prices...

Which do you guys think is best?

Seagate for $359.99

Western Digital for $279.99

Hitachi for $309.99

Hitachi for $369.99

The first and the last seem too bloody expensive, and I'm tempted to just get the least expensive one, the Western Digital. All the new drive will be used for is storage of digital photography, so I doubt I need a super-duper mega drive, just an adequate one.
 
I've personally used in my Mac Pro Seagate 7200.10, Samsung Spinpoints and Western Digital SE, all 500GB models and the recent most ones at that. Without a doubt the Western Digital is the fastest in benchmarks and arguably in day to day use although this is probably 'perceived' more than anything else.

I can post the benches if you really want, but I'd recommend WD for Mac Pros above all others.

valdore - nice HDR pictures, are you using using Photomatix?)
 
valdore said:
I want to buy a 1 Terabyte drive for my Mac Pro. OWC seems to have good prices...

Which do you guys think is best?

Seagate for $359.99

Western Digital for $279.99

Hitachi for $309.99

Hitachi for $369.99

The first and the last seem too bloody expensive, and I'm tempted to just get the least expensive one, the Western Digital. All the new drive will be used for is storage of digital photography, so I doubt I need a super-duper mega drive, just an adequate one.
Click to expand...

First and last have a 5 year warranty. Two and three have a 3 year warranty.
 
If noise is not a concern, I ALWAYS suggest seagate.

Because the mac pro supports NCQ and Seagate does not allow disabling it or switching to a low noise mode, the Seagates are not able to be made quiet in a mac pro.

I have 5 western digital drives in mine. A utility called winAAM (XP only) allows the user to select 'quiet mode'. It really quiets down the drives and makes for a more pleasant computing experience. Especially for those who mix/record music.
 
Thanks for the advice guys. In interests of full disclosure I wound up starting a thread on this in the Buyers Advice section.



dogbait said:
valdore - nice HDR pictures, are you using using Photomatix?)
Click to expand...

Thanks! Yes indeed on the Photomatix, so far it's the best HDR editor I've come across. Sure beats the Photoshop HDR function anyway. :)
 
I recently bought three of these 750GB HITACHI Ultrastars. I went for the enterprise class because I've been burned in the past with cheaper hard drives. Surprisingly, all three drives work perfectly fine. And it was a relief to see they were manufactured in Indonesia rather than China. :)

I didn't write a review at Newegg. But if I did it would have five stars. When I bought them they were discounted $20 from the current $230 price.
 
surflordca said:
I asked Blogger what software he uses to clone his drive. What do you use for your back-ups? What ever it is does it also do a clone back-up?
Click to expand...

I'm just using the native backup capabilities of Leopard (Time Machine) and Vista Ultimate (full system restore backup, and daily file backups), so I don't need any extra software.

Can you clarify what you mean by a "clone back-up"? Are you merely looking to have a full image of your disk that you can restore on the same machine? If so, you probably don't need any additional software. If you are looking to boot directly to a "cloned" disk or you want to take that image to another system (especially for Vista), you may need extra software.
 
My Pro came with a 250Gb drive, a few weeks back I fitted a 500 Gb Barracuda as the main drive. I have found the Barracuda noticeably faster than the original.
 
For cloning you can use Disk utility. The most used third party apps are Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper (which is my preference, but is not quite ready for Leopard. According to the developer, it won't be long).
 
cokersa said:
I'm just using the native backup capabilities of Leopard (Time Machine) and Vista Ultimate (full system restore backup, and daily file backups), so I don't need any extra software.

Can you clarify what you mean by a "clone back-up"? Are you merely looking to have a full image of your disk that you can restore on the same machine? If so, you probably don't need any additional software. If you are looking to boot directly to a "cloned" disk or you want to take that image to another system (especially for Vista), you may need extra software.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. By cloning, yes I do mean a full disk image. A second HD would work just like the first drive but not bootable.
 
Blogger said:
For cloning you can use Disk utility. The most used third party apps are Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper (which is my preference, but is not quite ready for Leopard. According to the developer, it won't be long).
Click to expand...

Thanks for filling me in. I will try what is included with Leopard because FREE is good ;) but am will to purchase another if I have to. :(
 
You can try out Super Duper for free (and CCC), when it's Leopard friendly. Its great advantage is that it can clone, make the clone bootable, and then do incremental backups of any changes while remaining bootable. it can also be scheduled. I''ll be using it to back up to two drives (which different schedules), and Time machine on a third.
 
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