View Full Version : Mac Pro Hard Drives
I ordered a Mac Pro with just one hard drive, the 250 GB one, but I would like to upgrade the capacity a little. I was wondering if I should try and get a really fast hard drive for my primary HD and then just add 750 GB ones as I need more space or if I should just leave the 250 GB one as my main HD and just put in 750 GB ones as I need more space? I am asking because I didn't know if the 250 GB HD will slow down the performance of the machine as a main HD. Thanks in advance for the help and I am sorry if this is somewhat confusing/rambling! :D
You could get a Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM hard drive as your primary drive and then just add as many standard 7,200 RPM drives as you need. The real sweet spot for price right now is probably 250 GB, with hard drives that size costing under $100 each. You can go larger, but the price per GB will increase dramatically.
The speed increase you'll see from using a WD Raptor instead of a standard hard drive as your boot drive will be noticeable but probably not that dramatic. You will be fine just using standard hard drives for storage and for booting the OS, but it might be worth getting a Raptor if you're doing a lot of disk-intensive tasks. What will you be using the Mac Pro for?
I will use CS as soon as it is released in a Universal version and I might use Aperture until then. Other than I would like to back up my DVD's to a hard drive or two so that I don't have to haul all my DVD's too and from school. I also might do a little video editing but that will probably be just iMovie unless I get pretty interested in it and then I would move up to FCP. It seems like the 250 GB hard drive it comes with should be fine then, but what do you think for other hard drives? Any suggestions for a large capacity drive such as 500 or 750 GB drive? Thanks!
Remember, you do have room for FOUR hard drives in there. Of course, it would be a pain if you bought three more 250 GB hard drives and then had to juggle files around if you ever wanted to replace one of those 250s with a 500-750 GB drive. But like I said, 250 GB is really the best deal you can get, currently.
250 GB hard drives cost as little as $80. Merely increasing that capacity to 300 or 320 GB increases the price to the $100-$120. Above that, 400 GB hard drives range in price from $140 to as much as $180, and 500 GB hard drives range from $200 at the very cheapest to as much as $260, depending on which brand you get and where you buy it from. The hard drives larger than 250 GB cost much more per GB (large increases in price for comparatively small storage increases) and they vary in price much more.
I wouldn't recommend filling all four drive bays with 250 GB hard drives, though. They're cheap but it'll limit your capacity to 1 TB, which may sound like a lot, but you can burn through that pretty fast. And like I said, it'll mean a nightmare if you ever need to increase your storage space. Leave at least one bay open to accommodate a later purchase of a very large drive in case it becomes necessary. Just remember that the largest capacity hard drives available are rarely the best deals. 400, 500, and 750 GB hard drives all cost over 40 cents per GB, vs. just over 30 cents per GB for 250, 300, and 320 GB ones.
I will use CS as soon as it is released in a Universal version and I might use Aperture until then. Other than I would like to back up my DVD's to a hard drive or two so that I don't have to haul all my DVD's too and from school. I also might do a little video editing but that will probably be just iMovie unless I get pretty interested in it and then I would move up to FCP. It seems like the 250 GB hard drive it comes with should be fine then, but what do you think for other hard drives? Any suggestions for a large capacity drive such as 500 or 750 GB drive? Thanks!
My WD 500 works fine and only costs $200. I made it my boot disk earlier today, and use the stock 250 it came with purely as a Windows drive. Got it off NewEgg.
PS - Photoshop is REALLY fast over here. I am, of course, coming from a 1 GHz G4 but still, it seems plenty fast to me.
So I have been researching getting another HD for my Mac Pro more lately and have some new questions!
Is Western Digital really less reliable then Seagate because there is a big price difference between their 500 GB HDs?
Also I have heard that the 750 GB Seagate can cause slowdowns because it draws a lot more power. Is this true and should I just stick with 500 GB drives then?
Any suggestion on where to get HDs? I know about newegg but I was wondering if anybody has dealt with other companies and gotten good deals and good reliable drives.
Thanks in advance!
Anybody have advice on my above questions? Especially the 750 gb slowdown!
kidtwist
2006-09-25, 19:30
I do not have an answer about the slow down, but I've heard bad things about Western Digital lately. People say quality control is pretty bad. Seagate seems to be the preference these days. At least among the people I know.
I'm in the same boat as you though. A new Mac Pro and I'm considering a new hard drive. I was at Fry's the other day and they had 400 GB Seagate SATA drives on sale for $119. Give them a try if there's one near you.
I do not have an answer about the slow down, but I've heard bad things about Western Digital lately. People say quality control is pretty bad. Seagate seems to be the preference these days. At least among the people I know.
I'm in the same boat as you though. A new Mac Pro and I'm considering a new hard drive. I was at Fry's the other day and they had 400 GB Seagate SATA drives on sale for $119. Give them a try if there's one near you.
May I mention that I just had to send two Seagate drive back to the for RMA swap? It seems most are all about the same now. Hit or miss, just go for the longer warranty, which I think it Seagate at this point with 5 years.
I do not have an answer about the slow down, but I've heard bad things about Western Digital lately. People say quality control is pretty bad. Seagate seems to be the preference these days. At least among the people I know.
I'm in the same boat as you though. A new Mac Pro and I'm considering a new hard drive. I was at Fry's the other day and they had 400 GB Seagate SATA drives on sale for $119. Give them a try if there's one near you.
My WD is great.
Do the 750 GB ones draw more power because this could be the cause of slowdown? Am I the only one that heard about this?
By the way, thanks for all the advice thus far!
Another question came up and I was wondering if anyone had a quick explanation or fix for this problem. When I turn on my Mac Pro or do a restart it takes a long time. I just turned it on and it took 1 minute before the apple logo showed up. It was just gray screen for a minute. The total start up time was a little over 1 and a half minutes. Is that normal for a 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM, the stock 250 GB HD, and a seagate 7200 RPM 500 GB HD as a secondary drive? Or is it a slow startup because the 250 GB stock drive that came with it isn't a great boot disk speed wise? Any suggestions or links to drive comparisons in a Mac Pro for best speed as the main boot drive? Thanks in advance for the help!
LudwigVan
2007-01-12, 17:15
Grasping at straws here, but does Mac OS X still do some kind of memory check while it's booting?
I don't know but I am kind of concerned about it taking so long to start up because the more I have researched it seems like the average time is approximately 15 seconds compared to my minute plus. http://www.barefeats.com/quad08.html
Anybody have any ideas about why my Mac Pro takes so long to start up?
No idea here. Have you tried the hardware tests?
Sorry if this is a really dumb question but....uh....how do I do that? :D
Sorry if this is a really dumb question but....uh....how do I do that? :D
One of your install disks should have Hardware Test written on it. You would have to boot in to hardware test. That's the best I can tell you. I've never run it personally. I'm sure there is guidance on Apple's site though.
Thank you. What should I be looking for when I do the hardware test though? Just anything unusual?
LudwigVan
2007-01-13, 23:50
The reason I brought up the memory check was because I remember some discussion a couple years ago regarding the length of time it took OS X to do some kind of confirmation/analysis of the memory during start-up, especially on machines with large amounts of memory (your 6 gigs seems greater than normal for the average Mac Pro).
Thank you. What should I be looking for when I do the hardware test though? Just anything unusual?
Yeah, my thought is memory or other logic board just for the sake of ruling it out. It doesn't sound like anything is actually wrong, but the HW test will help to rule out a hardware issue.
I ran the hardware test (quick one then the full one) and it reported no problems. I just did a startup and it was about 45 seconds from the time I pressed my power button. This seems to be pretty long still. Should I start a thread in the genius bar to try to get some more help on this or just not worry about the long startup time?
Depends on how bad a 45 second delay bothers you. It doesn't seem like a problem to me, but I have never ran a Mac Pro or PowerMac either. PC's are my only real benchmark other than my Mini. It's a G4 and not fast at startup either though.
It isn't the time that bothers me as much as the idea that there might be something wrong causing it to be so slow at startup.
It isn't the time that bothers me as much as the idea that there might be something wrong causing it to be so slow at startup.
If the delay is the only "problem" you're facing with the Mac Pro, then I would say it is a non-issue technically. If it gets longer and longer, run the HW tests again and worst case, take it to a GB.
Zap the PRAM.
Then try changing your startup disk in the Startup Disk syspref to the other drive, and then changing it back to your actual startup disk again, and closing System Preferences.
Then reboot.
If there is still no change - remove all but 1 GB of RAM and repeat testing.
What do you mean the other drive? Only one of my drives (the one I installed OS X on) is bootable right?
Try to de-select and then re-select your OS X drive.
OK so I did that and it was about a 30 second start up which isn't bad at all. Thanks for the help! I am going to try to sell the 2 GB that came with my mac pro soon so I will move down to 4 GB, which is still plenty for me, and I shall see if that changes the startup time.
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