New internal HD

[Anders Peev]

Hi friends!

I've scanned the forum and I know there should be a thread (or several) on this topic but I can't find it. Does anyone know where they are?

I've got everything on a single boot drive at the moment and need a second drive for audio and VIs. Is it a good option to get one from apple directly? Is it worth waiting for solid stat drives to become less expensive?

Cheers/

Anders

[kgdrum]

i would not buy drives from Apple,here in the USA http://www.macsales.com is very good source for HD's. Apple charges way too much for HD's,I do not know any good sources in Europe.
SSD hard drives are still to new and expensive imo and the performance benefits are somewhat debatable as of now......in a year or 2 the SSD drive might be the way to go.


if you can get 2 drives I will recommend 1 drive for samples and another drive for audio(7200 rpm 16 mb cache as a minimum spec to aim for).
It goes without saying you should also have an additional drive to back up your projects as well as a clone of your boot drive just in case.........................
Good Luck!

[dosuna11]

i would not buy drives from Apple,here in the USA http://www.macsales.com is very good source for HD's. Apple charges way too much for HD's,I do not know any good sources in Europe.
SSD hard drives are still to new and expensive imo and the performance benefits are somewhat debatable as of now......in a year or 2 the SSD drive might be the way to go.


if you can get 2 drives I will recommend 1 drive for samples and another drive for audio(7200 rpm 16 mb cache as a minimum spec to aim for).
It goes without saying you should also have an additional drive to back up your projects as well as a clone of your boot drive just in case.........................
Good Luck!

I agree and one more drive for back-up.

[stephentayler]

I get my drives from this place in the UK - I put 3 Hitachi Deskstar 500Gb in my MacPro

http://www.macupgrades.co.uk/store/mach ... me=mac-pro

I don't know if they can ship to Sweden, but have a look

Cheers

Stephen

[SixStringGeek]

Never buy drives or memory from Apple. They'll charge you about 5x the market price.

I've stuffed my mac pro with six 500G Western Digitals paying under $100 each for them over a year ago. I just looked and they're about $65 right now.

If you buy multiple drives (assuming you have room for them) you can get higher theoretical speeds by arranging them into a software RAID turning on striping. Striping spreads the data over multiple drives giving you more bandwidth. So 4 drives gives you (almost) 4x the bandwidth.

[twistedtom]

I got three 1 TB's from OWC for a good price. The WD and Seagates are good, I like the 1TB WD blacks, do not buy the WD greens.

[Anders Peev]

Thank you all for your swift replies my dear Unicorns!

I will not get any drives from apple. I wonder if I should get into this RAID thing. I assume I need 2 more drives with the same specifications? And then move all my projects, VI:s and audio to the two RAID drives and leave the boot drive as it is? Will I need a RAID card?

Do any of you have experience from which drives that would be the most quiet ones? I know that my mac pro never will be dead silent.

Yours/

Anders

[twistedtom]

In the 1TB size which is what I researched the Seagate’s are the quietest ones followed by the WD, it has to do with the number of platters on the drives. The WD black is slightly faster at some things than the Seagate. I got 2 Seagate’s and one WD to keep the noise down.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Been telling you guys about Seagate for a while now. Well, it's back:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?sto ... 0090034465

Issues with Mac Pro Seagate drives after installing 10.5.7

MacFixIt reader Clinton C. writes in to tell us about an issue regarding his internal Seagate hard drive on his Mac Pro and what he did to fix it.


MacFixIt reader Clinton C. writes:
"After updating my MacPro to OS X 10.5.7, I started having a lot of drive problems. Basically slow to start, plus my other three internal drives would not mount, including three firewire external drives.
I talked with AppleCare, and ended up taking it to the local Apple Store [Altamonte Springs, FL], but to no avail. They [Apple] said there was nothing they could do to diagnose a drive/logic board issue when it was not their [Apple's] OEM drives."

Possible solution
After researching the issue further online, Clinton found this solution:
"Upon the return to my office, and searching the internet for similar problems, I starting finding articles about problems with a series of Seagate drives, in my case, the model ST3259310NS with firmware SN05. Since I have running four of these drives since February 2009 with no problems, the only conclusion was that the 10.5.7 upgrade now made this my problem.
I found the solution at XLR8YourMac. I did what they demonstrated, upgraded to firmware SN06, and it worked. No problems now, at least for the last two hours since I ran the fix. All my drives are mounting, including the externals."

As always, we here at MacFixIt recommend that you have all your data backed up before attempting operating system or firmware updates. If you have hardware installed that did not come from Apple directly, it is always a good idea to check for updates to the firmware for those hardware devices when experiencing poor system performance.

[kgdrum]

I used Seagates for many years and they were very good.
with the problems they have been having lately ,I went with OWC's recommendation and switched to Hitachi drives,so far so good...............
I put 5 new drives in the system(750 gig 7200 rpm 32mb cache,enterprise drives w/ 5 year warranty)all have been good.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I've had good luck with Western Digital as well.

[twistedtom]

If I recall the ones with the problems were slightly older than the ones I got, I checked my numbers when read that and only some of them were the faulty ones. I will how ever check in to what this issue may be as I did up grade to 10.5.7 and with some programs some times it does feel as if the drives have slowed down.

Yes I have to say if the keep having problems go with the WD or what ever.

[Jim]

They're all good, and they're all bad. No manufacturer of drives has a spotless record making infallible products. Seagate and WD have drives with a one year warranty, and they have drives with a five year warranty. Which models do you think are the better drives?

[Anders Peev]

Hi friends!

I've been jumping around on WDs and Seagates pages for some time now. Right now I'm aiming for the WD caviar black or the Seagate 7200.12. I still have some questions if you don't mind:

Will the 1TBs be louder than 750 GBs in general?

Is the Seagate ES.2 an option too? Or is that one ment for as a server?

And does anyone of you Seagate users know what this means:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/produc ... ernal_kit/

Do I need some kind of kit in order to install it? It says on a swedish resellers home page that the 7200.12 comes without screws and cables.

Yours/

Anders

[Jim]

Hi friends!

I've been jumping around on WDs and Seagates pages for some time now. Right now I'm aiming for the WD caviar black or the Seagate 7200.12. I still have some questions if you don't mind:

Will the 1TBs be louder than 750 GBs in general?

Is the Seagate ES.2 an option too? Or is that one ment for as a server?

And does anyone of you Seagate users know what this means:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/produc ... ernal_kit/

Do I need some kind of kit in order to install it? It says on a swedish resellers home page that the 7200.12 comes without screws and cables.

Yours/

Anders

Anything meant for a server is heavy duty, and you shouldn't avoid them. You don't need screws and cables if you're just replacing an older drive. Just swap drives. Make sure you buy the right interface, PATA or SATA. That's all. If you're replacing a system drive in some older Macs, they may be PATA.

I have 8 1TB drives in a RAID, and they're pretty quiet. But, that's kind of relative, isn't it?