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Harddrives for new Nehalem Mac Pro -

FredrikL

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Hi,

I am getting my new 8-core Mac Pro in just a few days now and was looking around for internal harddrives. I didnt get harddrives from apple because of wild pricing, but have bad experience from a few years back getting an internal harddrive that disappeared totally after just a day or two!

Thought of starting out with the 3 x 1TB to fill up the slots.

Any wise tips for what to look for?
Brands that work better - and which ones to avoid?
Or preferably exact model?

Sincerely,

Fredrik
 
hate to contradict

hate to contradict

this is always a dangerous question, brand loyalty can be pretty intense.

Western Digital Black (32meg, 2 proc) are great. I filled my bays with the 1 TB model.

I have an external raid full of seagate 1.5 terrabyte drives, they are rock solid too.

if I could reccomend, it would be to buy one level below the biggest of a brand and then churn those into external drives when you upgrade next time.

Almost any drive you'll find bad ones, and good ones. My nehalam loves both those brands...
 
Thanks Jesse and Patrick,

Seagate sounds good. Fairly similar pricing as far as I can tell.

And - I take it 1.5 TB (x3) right into my MacPro is no problem?

(I thought - maybe somewhat stupidly - only 1 TB was tops...? Looking at the apple-specs on the 8 core...?)

Fredrik
 
Frederik.

the 1.5 TB drives should live very nicely in your machine.

the limit of one Tb on the apple site is because they are the only ones they sell. It seems apple favours the WD (non black) drives for their bto options. Probably no reason for that, other than getting a good deal from WD.

I can verify first hand that the 1.5 drives work fine.
 
I usuallly avoid WD at all costs, I have always had great experiences with Seagate drives, got four of them in my MacPro and never any problems.

1.5 TB - $130 Compusa

Best, more reliable HD in industry are the ones from Hitachi/IBM, and they're among the faster ones too, but there are no 1.5TB for them, 1TB 32MB cache 7200RPM 3GB SATAII, part # CinemaStar 7K1000 1TB, developed for digital video.

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.6893bc7a231364ae4bda9f30eac4f0a0/
 
If you are looking to go VERY HIGH END for your SYSTEM DRIVES ONLY, I would recommend using a high quality SLC SSD. Then you could use normal spinning disks for media drives where high capacity is necessary.

An SSD is a hard drive where the primary storage medium is through Semiconductors (Non-Volatile Flash Memory Chips) rather than a magnetic media, such as in a traditional Hard Drive. SSD is a Flash Memory based storage device that can replace the mechanical Hard Disk Drive (HDD), the last analog device remaining in a computer. SSDs are most effective for systems where I/O response time is crucial. Data stored on SSDs should include anything that creates bottlenecks, such as operating systems, Databases, Swap Files, Library and Index Files, and metadata information. SSDs do not have any moving parts - while a traditional HDD has drive motors & needs to spend time spinning up the Magnetic Platters & the Drive Heads to access individual blocks, all the storage on an SSD is handled by Flash Memory Chips. This provides three distinct advantages:

1. Faster data access with less than 0.1 milliseconds Access Time, & speeds of 130MB/s Read & 120MB/s Write

2. Far higher reliability, with Hard Drive crashes virtually eliminated

3. Significantly less power usage.

The most salient advantage of the flash-memory-based SSD is that it can improve the speed of the computer far better than the Hard Disk Drive. We carry MemoRight SSDs which are regarded amongst the top in their class
 
Seagate Barracudas
 
we use 300GB 10,000 RPM WD Velociraptors for system and 1.5TB Seagates in external Raid. WD and Seagate are both top quality.
 
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