Best Hard Drive for G5

cubehead · Post by **cubehead** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 9:59 am

Does anyone know what the best hard drive I can put in a G5 is? Thanks

gearboy · Post by **gearboy** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 10:22 pm

I've got two Western Digital Caviar drives in my G5. A 320GB for the system drive (partitioned in half), plus a 500GB drive for recording and storage (again, partitioned in half). Both have a 16MB cache and are 7200RPM SATA drives.

I've had the 500GB drive since last August and the 320GB drive since April. The 500GB drive was $199 almost a year ago and the 320GBdrive was $99. Pretty amazing that so much space costs so little these days.

Jeff

OldTimey · Post by **OldTimey** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 9:09 am

depends what you mean by "best"

for best performance, nothing beats the 10K RPM Raptor series...i think they go up to 150 GB (maybe higher now...)

for storage, any SATA drive with 16MB of cache would be pretty good, the one's jeff mentioned, or the newer 750GB ones...

I use two 750GB Seagates @ work, and tax them pretty hard capturing and editing video.

btw, sataII drives will work just fine in a G5, they just get scaled down to sataI speeds.

cubehead · Post by **cubehead** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 11:17 am

The 10k sounds good. Will it help to replace both the os drive and the drive I write audio to? Or is just the audio drive enough

Thanks

OldTimey · Post by **OldTimey** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 11:28 am

cubehead wrote:The 10k sounds good. Will it help to replace both the os drive and the drive I write audio to? Or is just the audio drive enough

Thanks

hmm...usually what the 10K is best is not for playing back audio data (unless you are playing back an insane number of 24-bit, 96k audio tracks) but rather for:

A) used as a system/boot drive, where apps will launch faster, and tons of little files are being created and moved all the time

B) a scratch disk, for video, photo work

C) for streaming sample libraries direct from disk. eg, some people will keep a VI with a big library, like Ivory on a single drive.

If all you are looking for is an additional drive to store audio projects, do yourself a favor and get something big, at least 300GB.

if you plan to upgrade both drives, a common practice would be to exchange the boot drive for a 10K raptor, and then get a big, 16mb cache drive @ 7200rpm for storing audio and project data.

10K drives are much more expensive per GB, so keep that in mind.

cubehead · Post by **cubehead** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 12:32 pm

but it can't hurt to run a 10k on both correct?

OldTimey · Post by **OldTimey** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:20 pm

cubehead wrote:but it can't hurt to run a 10k on both correct?

just your wallet!

no in all honesty, it certainly wouldnt hurt performance...as long as you are ok with having less total hard drive space on internal disks.

cubehead · Post by **cubehead** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 7:37 am

thanks for the tips..

Chris

HCMarkus · Post by **HCMarkus** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:29 pm

Raptors are also excellent for VI use.