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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Internal MacPro Drives

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Paul Harding

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What are the best drives to fit inside the 3 spare bays for a raid for Mac Pro 8 core?
Paul
 
I've been using Western digital Caviar Black 1 TB drives (purchased at Newegg) for a while now. They are fast and reliable. I think better than Seagate, irrespective of the fact they are used in Cruise Missile guidance systems, I have had crashes with them, but not with the WDs.
 
Thanks Richard.
I normally use seagate, and I have had some problems with my external raid with drives failing, I run raid 5 so when I replace the faulty drive I am back up and running. If I now take the failed drive drop into a caddy and reformat it it becomes usable again. Strange.

Paul
 
You will get different answer from every single person you ask. Usually citing (company name here) being better than (company name here) for some arbitrary reason. Some one will point out that (company name here)'s drives are used in (impressive situation here). Don't ask people what they think about technology, they are unreliable due to the need to always justify their own decisions ;)

Bottom line is, HDD's don't fail incredibly often anymore from most of the respectable companies, take a look at a site like barefeets or anandtech to get some benchmark numbers and get what performs best for the price.

All that said. I have always been happy performance and reliability using Hitachi drives.
 
I haven't had any trouble with my Western Digital Caviar drives yet. The 2TB Black is my local work drive, and it seems to be as fast as the 1TB black one. The Green ones are cheaper, but slower. I use them for backup. The 2TB green ones are $95 or so, the black $150-$200.
 
Curran Giddens said:
I've had good luck with the Hitachi Enterprise Series drives. I have 4 of them in a software RAID 0 inside my Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Yikes, I don't think I'll ever be brave enough to have 4 drives in a RAID 0.
It's 4x the risk of data loss; lose one, lose all.
I hope you do frequent backups.

I'll happily do RAID 5 with 4 drives, but never 0 unless they're being backed up to a RAID 5, 6 or 10 religiously.
 
I use 3 x 1TB Western Digital too, really reliable (*knock on wood)

Wouldn't do RAID 0 on 4 drives either, but if you can RAID all 4 it means you got the Apple RAID card. If so, I would really advice on switching it to RAID 5. That way, if one drive fails, you still got all your data. With RAID 0... Not so much...
 
Thor Melsted said:
I'll happily do RAID 5 with 4 drives, but never 0 unless they're being backed up to a RAID 5, 6 or 10 religiously.
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Even with other raids you have to think about what will happen if the RAID controller has issues. You may very well end up with 4 corrupt drives.

Always backup =)
 
I prefer the WD RE series drives for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost is I've found them to be more reliable than other vendors over the long run, but that is based on personal experience, not a large enough sample size to be a material factor for you. (That said I've bought thousands of drives)

In general the WD's are a bit faster right now than their competitors, and the RE series are built specifically for raid installations.

But there is another distinct advantage if you have a reasonable large number of arrays, meaning that sooner or later a drive will fail. When it does, WD has an expedited return policy that means that you don't have to jump through hoops and provide failure codes that the crappy software can't provide because the software can't see upstream of the raid controller, and they'll ship a replacement drive immediately without charging you. They take your credit card number in case you don't return the failed drive, but you essentially end up just pay shipping cost.

I keep a spare for each array, but given each array is built out of identical drives, bought at the same time, I don't like waiting a couple of weeks for my spare drive to get processed and shipped back.

My $.02

Steve
 
Thanks guys, a lot of varied advice here. I'll start digging on the specs

Paul
 
Colin Sheldon said:
Even with other raids you have to think about what will happen if the RAID controller has issues. You may very well end up with 4 corrupt drives.

Always backup =)
Click to expand...

Yes. Most definitely.

I haven't read every post in here -- opinions on hard drives are always varied based on personal experience. But with the number of drives I've bought over the past few years, and the variety, I think it's safe to say that you'll be fine with most any of the current 1TB 7200rpm models. Personally, I prefer the WD Black X 1TB 7200rpm w/64MB cache. They are the fastest, best overall performing and have been rock solid here. Lots of people liking the Samsung F3's and I've bought a few and tested them. Very nice drives there too, great performance, not as good as the WD Black X drives, but the Samsungs are a good bit cheaper. There's also the Hitachi and Seagate ones and I would recommend the Hitachi's as well. I have Hitachi drives in both my Mac Pro systems.

The only drives I DO NOT recommend are the 1.5TB Seagate drives. They are absolute garbage. I've gone into detail about them before here on the forums. Just don't do it.

2TB drives from WD and Hitachi are proving very reliable so far. But be warned that they have additional platters, but fewer heads per platter area -- there's just not enough room inside the HDD enclosures. So the 2TB drives run noticeably slower. The absolute fastest HDDs out there are the 15Krpm 640GB SAS units. If you want to run a separate SAS controller. But the performance afforded (about 40% faster than the WD Black X units) comes at too much of a compromise to capacity and overall cost, IMO. Best to leave these to specialized applications such as server blades that have integrated SAS hosts and need speed over capacity.

Always, always, always have a good backup strategy in place. Simply trusting the redundancy of RAID 1, 5 or 6 is not enough and should never be trusted or counted on as any form of backup or security. I've lost too many RAID-5's when the host controller melts itself and takes 2 or 3 drives down with it or one drive cooks itself and surges the controller and/or another drive in the RAID.

The advantage to RAID-5, etc.. is convenience. If a drive goes down, you can swap it out and rebuild the array without having to restore from a backup. On the other hand, I have a few RAID-5 and RAID-6 units where when a drive goes down, I can re-format and re-load all the data from LTO tape faster than the RAID will rebuild itself. ...Just sayin'
 
Thor Melsted said:
I hope you do frequent backups.
Click to expand...

Dont worry, that is just my working drive to store the media I'm currently working on. Boot drive is an SSD in the second optical drive bay along with one of the Hitachi's. I use the drive tray #4 as a media transport drive. Original files and finished work are on bare SATA drives on the shelf. I use a drive dock to spin them up every once in a while.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
. . . .

Always, always, always have a good backup strategy in place. Simply trusting the redundancy of RAID 1, 5 or 6 is not enough and should never be trusted or counted on as any form of backup or security. I've lost too many RAID-5's when the host controller melts itself and takes 2 or 3 drives down with it or one drive cooks itself and surges the controller and/or another drive in the RAID.

The advantage to RAID-5, etc.. is convenience. If a drive goes down, you can swap it out and rebuild the array without having to restore from a backup. On the other hand, I have a few RAID-5 and RAID-6 units where when a drive goes down, I can re-format and re-load all the data from LTO tape faster than the RAID will rebuild itself. ...Just sayin'
Click to expand...

I had intended to create a RAID 5 using 3 existing 10K rpm 300GB VelociRaptors and the onboard Intel ICH10R Southbridge controller (ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard.) Reading about melting controllers has given me pause. If the onboard controller melts I guess that means no more SATA--no more motherboard. Is that likely? Do you recommend against using the onboard controller?
 
I often see people praising WD, but experience we had with their drives is by far the worst one. As for me the most reliable drives come from Samsung.
 
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