RAID 1 for Mac Pro

[ArchiMacUser]

I am looking to set up a RAID 1 drive in my new Mac Pro (which my credit card was just charged for so it should ship in the next few days!!) I purchased a Western Digital WD Caviar SE16 7200RPM 300Mb/sec 250Gb hard drive to run as the mirror drive but I was wondering which drive I should run as primary, or if it made a difference. The only difference between the drives that I am aware of is that the WD has a 16mb buffer while the pre-installed has only an 8mb buffer. Is it worth the hassle of transfering the OS and main applications over to the new drive? Or will the gains be fairly insignificant? I am a graduate architecture student and I will be using the Mac Pro for rendering, CAD, Photoshop, etc so I expect to be writing massive files on these drives. (potentially over 1Gb per file). Any input?

Also, the HD that I purchased says it is a 300mb/sec while the apple website says that the Mac Pro takes 3Gb/sec drives. Is that just theoretical speed or do I need to find a higher speed hard drive somewhere?

Finally, I intend to pull the 160Gb hard drive out of my WD "MyBook" external inclosure and put it in my Mac Pro as my M$ Windows hard drive. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? The HD looks to be about 3.75 inches wide and it is NOT a PATA drive, it looks like it is SATA. I don't really want to void my warranty breaking the thing open if it wont work but I am really tight for cash so buying ANOTHER hard drive is out of the question.

Any info would be appreciated!!!

 

[topgunn]

To put the drives in a RAID requires that they be reformatted. So, you will need to back everything up onto yout 160GB disk first.

With RAID 1, you don't have a primary drive. Each and every bit gets written to both hard drives.

When operating in a RAID, all hard drives operate at the speed of the slowest drive. You are only as fast as your slowest link.

The 3.5" HD should work. If it is indeed SATA, you won't have any problems. What makes you say that it is definetly not PATA but yet not sure if it is SATA. It almost has to be one or the other.

Is the drive 300Mb/s or 300MB/s? There are basically two generations of SATA disks; 1.5Gb/s and 3.0Gb/s. Those are theoretical speeds of the SATA channel but the 3G drives ARE faster than the 1.5G drives.

 

[kraftzwerg]

Is the drive 300Mb/s or 300MB/s? There are basically two generations of SATA disks; 1.5Gb/s and 3.0Gb/s. Those are theoretical speeds of the SATA channel but the 3G drives ARE faster than the 1.5G drives.

Is there a difference between 300Mb/s or 300MB/s?

 

[topgunn]

Is there a difference between 300Mb/s or 300MB/s?

There are 8 Mb in a MB. In this example, b is short for bit and B is short for byte. There are 8 bits in a byte. 300Mb/s is equivilent to 37.5MB/s and conversely 300MB/s is equivilent to 2400Mb/s.

 

[ArchiMacUser]

ignorance...

Opps! Didn't mean to display my ignorance that blatently!

I know it is not a PATA because I know what that looks like. I have messed around with installing extra hard drives enough to know that, but I have never seen a SATA drive before and I didn't know if there was a 3rd type of hard drive out there... thanks for setting me straight on that.

As to MB/sec vs. Mb/sec... I had no idea. I have been using Apples since 1987 and I had no idea that there was a difference between Mb and MB. I know that bits were used for the internet but I assumed it was just a transfer speed indicator. I feel absolutely retarded. Anyway, the box says that it is 300MB/s. the Model # on it is WD2500KSRTL if that helps you any. The only two types of SATA drives I saw at the store said 150MB/sec and 300MB/sec. Does that translate somehow into 1.5Gb and 3Gb (SATA 1 and SATA 2?) Would that be GigaBITS then? Given the admittedly meager amount of information I have been able to give you, do you think that the hard drive will work? I would hate to hamstring the drive already in my computer by throwing a slow drive in with it.

Thanks for you help, I really do appreciate it!