Mac Pro: recommend me a hard disk!

messiah

Okay, having enjoyed the benefits of a two-drive RAID 0 setup in my G5 Quad, I'm now toying with the idea of a four-drive RAID 0 in my Mac Pro...



Can any of you recommend a 250GB drive? There doesn't seem to be my difference in price between the various choices:



Samsung SP2504C (8MB)

Seagate Barracuda (8MB)

Seagate Barracuda (16MB)

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 (16MB)

WD Caviar SE16 (16MB)

Maxtor Maxline 3 (16MB)



I'm tempted by the Samsung, because I know they are extremely quiet and reliable, and their transfer speeds are solid when they get going. I also know from experience that the Maxtor Diamond Max is a good drive but it's very noisy, and four of them might be a bit of a nightmare.



Is there a particular mechanism that stands out?

lundy

Everyone is going to have personal experience. I only bought one new HD in the past few years and it was a Maxtor 250 that was DOA. Replaced fine with no hassle, but still...



From what I have read here and there, if I were getting a new one I would get the Samsung. BUt I have no personal experience with it.

joe_the_dragon

get a one with 16mb

xool

Personally I'd want a quiet drive with as much cache as possible. I've had good experiences with Seagate drives in the past, so I'd probably purchase others.



If you're going quad drives the noise may not matter, but then again with 4 drives it probably adds up pretty quickly so this would make another case for quiet.

ai51240

I don't know about what's the best, but I do know that basically the same drive that's in there is on sale at Best Buy for $80. I picked one up the other day and it works great. At that price, why not get two or three?



Western Digital WD2500KSRTL at bestbuy.com

northernlights

It's a bit offtopic, but as I upgrade my mac pro with a Samsung SP2004C, I plan to use it as a primary drive, is there any way to copy everthing from the stock drive to the new one and then to switch the drives?

lundy

Sure. You can install the OS on the new drive by booting from the DVD, and then use Migration Assistant (in /Applications/Utilities) to transfer all of your stuff over.



However, MA only transfers from one partition, and does not transfer stuff that has been added to any of the folders under /System or /Library. If you have apps that have inserted things there, then you may want to do a clone of the whole drive with Super Duper! or Carbon Copy Cloner (check VersionTracker).



Then just set the startup disk to be the new disk (in System Preferences/Startup Disk) and you are set.

rbf817

Quote:

Originally Posted by Messiah


Okay, having enjoyed the benefits of a two-drive RAID 0 setup in my G5 Quad, I'm now toying with the idea of a four-drive RAID 0 in my Mac Pro...



Can any of you recommend a 250GB drive? There doesn't seem to be my difference in price between the various choices:



Samsung SP2504C (8MB)

Seagate Barracuda (8MB)

Seagate Barracuda (16MB)

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 (16MB)

WD Caviar SE16 (16MB)

Maxtor Maxline 3 (16MB)



I'm tempted by the Samsung, because I know they are extremely quiet and reliable, and their transfer speeds are solid when they get going. I also know from experience that the Maxtor Diamond Max is a good drive but it's very noisy, and four of them might be a bit of a nightmare.



Is there a particular mechanism that stands out?

go for the Samsung.. sooo quiet compared to the original seagate drive in the machine

halse

have posted xbench results with a WDC .9, a seagate .10 and with two seagate .10 as RAID 0...... RAID 0 is the way to go (curiously RAID 0 seems to have less disk noise than using a single disk, but it is very quiet either way)

kuku

The barracuda's seems to be the best of the best.



I rather do 2x2 reaid 1 though. The MacPro's at this point is limited to the HD swaping for everyday tasks more then CPU.



A raid will speed that up a lot. That and more ram of course.



There is also the diamond max 11 out which is a good midrange in your list.

jeffdm

Quote:

Originally Posted by NORTHERNLiGHTS


It's a bit offtopic, but as I upgrade my mac pro with a Samsung SP2004C, I plan to use it as a primary drive, is there any way to copy everthing from the stock drive to the new one and then to switch the drives?

Super Duper is probably the quickest way to go, and it can even set the new drive as the startup disk when it's done transferring. The free version will do fine for you.

jeffdm

I've found that storagereview.com to be a decent resource to compare hard drives. Everyone has their own experiences and such, and that's not necessarily a good indicator as you will always find some bad story about every company, even if it was an excellent company all around.



Personally I've just been going with Seagate. I've never had trouble with them, decently quiet, fairly cool running, with the longest warranty for a consumer internal drive.

skatman

Quote:

Originally Posted by Messiah


Okay, having enjoyed the benefits of a two-drive RAID 0 setup in my G5 Quad, I'm now toying with the idea of a four-drive RAID 0 in my Mac Pro...



Can any of you recommend a 250GB drive? There doesn't seem to be my difference in price between the various choices:



Samsung SP2504C (8MB)

Seagate Barracuda (8MB)

Seagate Barracuda (16MB)

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 (16MB)

WD Caviar SE16 (16MB)

Maxtor Maxline 3 (16MB)



I'm tempted by the Samsung, because I know they are extremely quiet and reliable, and their transfer speeds are solid when they get going. I also know from experience that the Maxtor Diamond Max is a good drive but it's very noisy, and four of them might be a bit of a nightmare.



Is there a particular mechanism that stands out?

Seagate is the way to go. Make sure you get the model with perpendicular recording (7200.10 160 gb/ platter) for max speed.

Your experience from Maxtor is a bit outdated... they were noisy before switching to FDB bearings. They're pretty quiet now.

I have tried Samsungs on various occasions, but they seem to have considerably more vibration than Seagate or Maxtor. As far as reliability, Samsung doesn't have enough of a history to make a good judgement on reliability.

exhibit_13

i would also suggest the seagate drive. i have a 160 gb seagate in my pc right now, and it works fantastic. one of the great things about seagate is that the drives come with a 5-year warranty, where others only come with 1-3 years. so if something happens to go wrong, you're backed up for longer. whether that'll actually be a problem or not, i dunno, but its something to consider. 16mb cache is also a given on that one...

celluloidpropaganda

This seems like as good a place as any to piggy-back for help. New MP on its way, I downgraded the stock drive to 160GB, it'll go in an external case for backups.



One drive will be dedicated to iTunes (re-rip my CDs in Apple Lossless and pack it all away, room left over for bit-torrented TV shows).



The other three (or two) will house a Photoshop/Aperture setup, normal user stuff. Would a RAID 0 offer significant performance gain - 2x250 (startup, apps - overkill, but price-wise there's no reason to go with less storage) with a third disk (500GB WD or Maxtor) for first-level storage and working files?

messiah

Quote:

Originally Posted by celluloidpropaganda


This seems like as good a place as any to piggy-back for help. New MP on its way, I downgraded the stock drive to 160GB, it'll go in an external case for backups.



One drive will be dedicated to iTunes (re-rip my CDs in Apple Lossless and pack it all away, room left over for bit-torrented TV shows).



The other three (or two) will house a Photoshop/Aperture setup, normal user stuff. Would a RAID 0 offer significant performance gain - 2x250 (startup, apps - overkill, but price-wise there's no reason to go with less storage) with a third disk (500GB WD or Maxtor) for first-level storage and working files?

I don't know how accurate Xbench is, but I was getting a score of 156.03 for a stock configuration with 2GB of RAM. That score jumped to 206.74 as soon as I used a two-drive RAID 0 as my boot drive. The difference in performance is immediately noticable.



The disk test portion of Xbench would certainly back up my experiences with my Mac Pro – that regardless of how many expensive FB-DIMMs you install, it is the standard hard disk config. that brings the Mac Pro to its knees.



From what I've been using the machine for, I've never been able to max out two of the processor cores never mind three or four. Most of the time all four cores are just idling as the Mac Pro can't get the data of the hard disk fast enough to feed two cores, regardless if they are Universal or PowerPC apps.



This is why I'm so interested to try a four-drive RAID 0 setup. I suspect that such a drive setup will transform the performance of a Mac Pro. I'd love to try four Raptors, but the price of such a setup is well outwith my means...

jeffdm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Messiah


I don't know how accurate Xbench is, but I was getting a score of 156.03 for a stock configuration with 2GB of RAM. That score jumped to 206.74 as soon as I used a two-drive RAID 0 as my boot drive. The difference in performance is immediately noticable.



The disk test portion of Xbench would certainly back up my experiences with my Mac Pro – that regardless of how many expensive FB-DIMMs you install, it is the standard hard disk config. that brings the Mac Pro to its knees.



From what I've been using the machine for, I've never been able to max out two of the processor cores never mind three or four. Most of the time all four cores are just idling as the Mac Pro can't get the data of the hard disk fast enough to feed two cores, regardless if they are Universal or PowerPC apps.



This is why I'm so interested to try a four-drive RAID 0 setup. I suspect that such a drive setup will transform the performance of a Mac Pro. I'd love to try four Raptors, but the price of such a setup is well outwith my means...

The XBench score is fairly arbitrary, it really can't be applied to any task in assuming a certain type of program, one computer is going to be about 30% faster than another. The performance improvement you get by striping multiple drives helps it retrieve larger files, the smaller files don't get much of a boost. Also, the benefit per application varies.



I think a greater explaination as to why you can't max out more cores is the software. The apps often don't break up the heavy work into enough threads, so you have to have several programs working their hardest in order to make the best use of a quad.



The Raptors are a hard thing to justify, but they do get you a lot better seek times which helps it retrieve small files scattered around the system quicker. Striping cheaper drives gets you better max bandwidth, but it doesn't help you retrieve small files any quicker, and there are a lot of small files in a typical OS X system.

e1618978

www.silentpcreview.com is where I go for hard drive reviews, they even have sound samples of some of the drives so you can hear what they sound like.