What is the fastest/best drive you can get for the MacPro if capacity isn't the concern. Is a 10000RPM SATA drive as good as it gets? Are smaller drives faster than larger drives?
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Fastest drive for MacPro (regardless of capacity)
- Thread starter hayduke
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The Hitachi 500 Gb perpendicular recording drives give the Raptor a run for their money.
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php
Are you suggesting a hardware RAID set of these linky linky? I was thinking of an internal drive that I would probably boot off of and then use the current 750 GB drive as a "data" drive and scratch drive. Is that a sensible thing to do?
No. It just has a window so you can watch it work
Not in the standard drive bays. They are hardwired for SATA.
he said nothing of noise concern, and they are not terribly loud if you get grommets, if you dont, good luck.
Actually, smaller drives are slower than larger ones.
1) lower areal density. A larger capacity drive usually packs more data bits per track, such as with perpendicular recording
2) the heads move to inside tracks sooner (throughput is directly related to the track length - that is, the londitudinal distance the head covers in one complete revolution. The closer you get to the hub of the platter, the less data passes under the head in one revolution
3) Smaller platter diameter, in the Raptors and in laptop drives, means less data per revolution compared to 'full size' 3.5" platters (see (2))
1) lower areal density. A larger capacity drive usually packs more data bits per track, such as with perpendicular recording
2) the heads move to inside tracks sooner (throughput is directly related to the track length - that is, the londitudinal distance the head covers in one complete revolution. The closer you get to the hub of the platter, the less data passes under the head in one revolution
3) Smaller platter diameter, in the Raptors and in laptop drives, means less data per revolution compared to 'full size' 3.5" platters (see (2))
Not sure what you are trying to say - but upgrading my PC's hard-drive from a 7200rpm Segate to a 70 gig Raptor gave me an ENORMOUS improvement in the responsiveness and 'snappy' performance jumping from app to app, loading and working on large files etc.
http://tomshardware.co.uk/storage/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=280&model2=142&chart=48
From an annecdotal perspective - I would agree with that chart.
If I had a Mac Pro - dropping a raptor in as the system HDD would be on my list of 'to dos'
Doug
http://tomshardware.co.uk/storage/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=280&model2=142&chart=48
From an annecdotal perspective - I would agree with that chart.
If I had a Mac Pro - dropping a raptor in as the system HDD would be on my list of 'to dos'
Doug
This is great to hear. I'll look into it a bit more. Thanks for the tips. The Raptor sounds good.
I have no idea whether you can get the SAS controller separately - SAS compatibility is there on the XServes. I run all my Dell Precisions and one of my XPS's using 15K SAS drives - they would be the best you can get, but you may have to settle for second best on the Mac.
go for Raptor 150
On the speed side the Raptor 150 G is unbeatable among all drives in the SATA field. Use it as a boot drive and you will be more then happy. I would not go with the X version (the one with the window) because of heat.
The window is non metal and does not contribute to heat radiation. This means the X version is hotter and has a shorter product live cycle.
However if money is not an issue go with a 15K SCSI, however this is most expensive. I am wondering in the days of Raptor how SCSI is able to sell.
On the speed side the Raptor 150 G is unbeatable among all drives in the SATA field. Use it as a boot drive and you will be more then happy. I would not go with the X version (the one with the window) because of heat. The window is non metal and does not contribute to heat radiation. This means the X version is hotter and has a shorter product live cycle.
However if money is not an issue go with a 15K SCSI, however this is most expensive. I am wondering in the days of Raptor how SCSI is able to sell.
The Raptor-X (as opposed to the non-windowed version) has a lower MTBF reliability, so I wouldn't bother with it unless you *really* want to watch it through the little window 
Well, In my QS, I have 2 Raptors, 1x 36GB as a boot drive, and a 74GB as a scratch disk, and they s c r e a m........they are way, way faster than any of the old ATA drives that were in there when I got it.........
Can you even use grommets with the mac pro bay sleeves? I know from my own experience that grommeted HDDs are almost silent in comparison, but did not know you could use them on a mac pro. Where can you even get them?
you can use grommets, but they need to be very thin. Otherwise the drive will hang too low and will not line up properly with the connections inside.
unless my office is ultra quite. I would have to disagree, when I first installed my Raptor, I could have sworn that the drive was bad, as It was really load. Before my Mac Pro how ever I had a Quicksilver that was rather noisy so dealing with a Mac Pro is very strange to me. Being able to hear the drives spin up with out having fan noise covering the room.
The drive is not bad at all, but I did notice a difference between it and my 7.2k
Raptor X RAID 0
I boot off a pair of internal Raptor X 150 GB drives in a RAID 0. Fantastic performance. Minimal noise. Perfect reliability. Earlier used two WD RE2 5000 GB drives in a RAID 0 array and it too was very responsive. Either way, using a RAID 0 TREMENDOUSLY improved overall responsiveness. Since RAID 0 inherently is a little risky, I have SuperDuper set up to mirror the start RAID every night to another non-RAID partition - which helps, since prior Apple firware upgrades cannot boot from a RAID startup disk when updating.
I boot off a pair of internal Raptor X 150 GB drives in a RAID 0. Fantastic performance. Minimal noise. Perfect reliability. Earlier used two WD RE2 5000 GB drives in a RAID 0 array and it too was very responsive. Either way, using a RAID 0 TREMENDOUSLY improved overall responsiveness. Since RAID 0 inherently is a little risky, I have SuperDuper set up to mirror the start RAID every night to another non-RAID partition - which helps, since prior Apple firware upgrades cannot boot from a RAID startup disk when updating.