Mac Pro 3.1 internal drive question

[dobro03]

I want to upgrade an internal SATA drive (bigger storage) for my MacPro 3.1 Quad core Xeon/2.8 GHz. Since this is from '08, what is the drive storage limit I can use? I am a composer and plan on using this for my orchestral sample libraries. Which 7200 SATA drive do you recommend since I need a fast as drive as possible. Don't want to get into SSDs yet because of the size of drive I need.

Thanks.

 

[longmover]

I want to upgrade an internal SATA drive (bigger storage) for my MacPro 3.1 Quad core Xeon/2.8 GHz. Since this is from '08, what is the drive storage limit I can use? I am a composer and plan on using this for my orchestral sample libraries. Which 7200 SATA drive do you recommend since I need a fast as drive as possible. Don't want to get into SSDs yet because of the size of drive I need.

Thanks.

Your only limit is bus speeds really, chuck in whatever size SATA drive you'd like and it should be fine For reference I have a 2TB one in my 08 MP

 

[dobro03]

So what 2T drive does anyone recommend for sample steaming?

WD Caviar Black
Hitachi
Seagate

Are these all the same or is any company faster, quieter etc.

Thank you.

 

[CaptainChunk]

I want to upgrade an internal SATA drive (bigger storage) for my MacPro 3.1 Quad core Xeon/2.8 GHz. Since this is from '08, what is the drive storage limit I can use? I am a composer and plan on using this for my orchestral sample libraries. Which 7200 SATA drive do you recommend since I need a fast as drive as possible. Don't want to get into SSDs yet because of the size of drive I need.

You can put any SATA drive you want in your Mac Pro. Currently, the largest disks available are 3TB.

So what 2T drive does anyone recommend for sample steaming?

WD Caviar Black
Hitachi
Seagate

Are these all the same or is any company faster, quieter etc.

I use Caviar Blacks quite a bit. They're definitely audible during disk access, but not annoyingly so. They're also among the fastest mechanical disks available for the price. In many cases, they rival the speed of Velociraptors.

Hitachis are so-so drives. Not bad, but not spectacular, either. I'd probably put Seagate's current offerings in the same category.

The Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives are also worth consideration. They're very fast and they're cheap. I can't really comment on reliability though.

 

[ahoover]

Seagates

You can put any SATA drive you want in your Mac Pro. Currently, the largest disks available are 3TB.



I use Caviar Blacks quite a bit. They're definitely audible during disk access, but not annoyingly so. They're also among the fastest mechanical disks available for the price. In many cases, they rival the speed of Velociraptors.

Hitachis are so-so drives. Not bad, but not spectacular, either. I'd probably put Seagate's current offerings in the same category.

The Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives are also worth consideration. They're very fast and they're cheap. I can't really comment on reliability though.

I have 4 Seagate ST32000641AS 2TB drives, 7200 RPM, In my Mac Pro 1.1. These are running OS X 10.7 - quiet, fast, reliable.

 

[derbothaus]

The Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives are also worth consideration. They're very fast and they're cheap. I can't really comment on reliability though.

I had 5 of them, 1 was bad/sketchy. It is out to pasture now. I got them for 49.00 each so I didn't throw a stink. They are fast but I would rather have Caviar Black. Spinpoint seems to have slow response and 4K vs. the Blacks. Spinpoint does have better bandwidth though approaching 150MB/s. Depends on what you are doing. Blacks for OS and RAID SQL stuff with high I/O and whatever suits your budget for everything else. Samsung and WD both better by and large than Hitachi and Seagate. Is Maxtor still around? If they are, they suck.

 

[flatfoot]

I had 5 of them, 1 was bad/sketchy. It is out to pasture now. I got them for 49.00 each so I didn't throw a stink. They are fast but I would rather have Caviar Black. Spinpoint seems to have slow response and 4K vs. the Blacks. Spinpoint does have better bandwidth though approaching 150MB/s. Depends on what you are doing. Blacks for OS and RAID SQL stuff with high I/O and whatever suits your budget for everything else. Samsung and WD both better by and large than Hitachi and Seagate. Is Maxtor still around? If they are, they suck.

Maxtor was bought by Seagate a few years ago.



I've been using Hitachi DeskStar 2TB 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 for years now and they've never failed on me.

 

[Mactrunk]

Another thumbs up for Caviar Black.
I've got six of them in there churning away.

 

[CaptainChunk]

I had 5 of them, 1 was bad/sketchy. It is out to pasture now. I got them for 49.00 each so I didn't throw a stink. They are fast but I would rather have Caviar Black. Spinpoint seems to have slow response and 4K vs. the Blacks. Spinpoint does have better bandwidth though approaching 150MB/s. Depends on what you are doing. Blacks for OS and RAID SQL stuff with high I/O and whatever suits your budget for everything else. Samsung and WD both better by and large than Hitachi and Seagate. Is Maxtor still around? If they are, they suck.

Yes, Caviar Blacks are too my drive of choice. I haven't had one die on me yet and the performance is always very good. I have bought Samsungs too in the past (a couple of older F1s) as cheap data drives - not bad little drives, they worked fine and haven't failed me yet. But for anything mission critical, it's Caviar Black for me.

 

[Boomhowler]

If you have the space I would recommend that you buy several drives and set up a raid0 to increase the available throughput for you. The samples are big enough to take advantage of the high speed of a raid, I'd guess.

How large is your sample library? There are pretty big SSDs out there now, but it might be a price issue?