Raptor as OSX drive?

[Celeron]

Anyone here running a WD Raptor 150 as their boot drive on a Mac Pro? I have one here in my PC system at the moment. If I buy a Mac Pro I was thinking of ditching the 250gig drive that it comes with and putting this in its place. I have another 320gig Seagate I'll use for bulk storage duties.

Has anyone done a similar change? Is it worth it?

 

[Simon R.]

Yep, I use one for that. It improved boot time with around 30-40%. I can boot up, from "ugly Mac sound" to completely booted in about 15 seconds. It makes A LOT MORE seeking noise than the WD/Seagate that the Mac Pro ships with, you should know. I think this can somewhat be toned down (although performance takes a hit) by turning on acoustic management. Can't do that on Mac though, so you would have to do that on a PC or using Boot Camp. The disk makes less vibrations than the stock HD though.

 

[Celeron]

Yep, I use one for that. It improved boot time with around 30-40%. I can boot up, from "ugly Mac sound" to completely booted in about 15 seconds. It makes A LOT MORE seeking noise than the WD/Seagate that the Mac Pro ships with, you should know. I think this can somewhat be toned down (although performance takes a hit) by turning on acoustic management. Can't do that on Mac though, so you would have to do that on a PC or using Boot Camp. The disk makes less vibrations than the stock HD though.

Cool, thanks for the heads up. I'm not worried about the seeking. The machine is already going to be 10x quieter than my PC.

 

[Pathetique]

Why ditch the 250? You'll have four hard drive bays...

 

[Veldek]

Yep, I use one for that. It improved boot time with around 30-40%. I can boot up, from "ugly Mac sound" to completely booted in about 15 seconds. It makes A LOT MORE seeking noise than the WD/Seagate that the Mac Pro ships with, you should know. I think this can somewhat be toned down (although performance takes a hit) by turning on acoustic management. Can't do that on Mac though, so you would have to do that on a PC or using Boot Camp. The disk makes less vibrations than the stock HD though.

I thought only the Raptor 74GB version would run on a Mac? I have one and it works great. Are you sure, you mean the bigger version of the harddisc?

 

[Kosh66]

I thought only the Raptor 74GB version would run on a Mac?

Why, they're both SATA HDs? Why wouldn't the Raptor 150GB work in a Mac?

I was planning on getting one too, to act as the boot drive and use the Apple one for data.

 

[techster85]

The larger raptor drives DO work in a mac, i don't know where you read that, but it's just not true. There are plenty of people on this forum who use the 150 gig raptor in their mac's...

 

[brooker]

The raptor may not help with boot time. A nice comparison was done by BareFeats of many different drives, solo and as a stripe set:

http://www.barefeats.com/quad08.html

... and yes, they used the 150 as well with no problems.

 

[jesteraver]

I might do that get the 150gb raptor if and when i get the Mac Pro, plus use the 250gb as an internal back up hard drive

 

[bpd115]

I have a 74 gig Raptor that I was going to use as my boot volume but I went with 2 500 gig Maxtor ProLines in raid 0 after reading the barefeets bench marks. Kept the 250 stock drive, added in a 320 gig and got a 320 gig PATA hd of newegg for 69 bucks that went into the optical bay.

The PATA drive I partitioned 100 gigs off of it for Vista and the rest I have as an OSX partition.

I put the raptor in an external enclosure, but I don't leave it on. The sucker is LOUD.

 

[THX1139]

The Raptor sucks unless you enjoy the pop pop pop, click click click sound whenever it's accessing. Annoying and hardly worth it when you consider it only shaves a second or two off boot times. I bought one and sent it back.

 

[techster85]

Would you say that the raptor is louder than the x1900 fans?

 

[Simon R.]

You're certainly right that the Raptor makes a LOUD seeking noise. I have SORT of gotten used to it, but if/when Seagate or someone else come out with a 10.000 RPM drive that is about the same speed but with less seek noise, I'll get one of those instead. The idle noise of the Raptor is lower/on par with the stock Seagate, but yes, the seek noise is rather intrusive.

 

[maxvamp]

???

The Raptor sucks unless you enjoy the pop pop pop, click click click sound whenever it's accessing. Annoying and hardly worth it when you consider it only shaves a second or two off boot times. I bought one and sent it back.

I have a 150 in a Quad, and I also have a WD 400 in the same machine. I use my quad for Video work.

There is no way that the Raptor sux!!. In fact, it OFTEN kicks the crap out of the WD 400 in performance, especially file transfer. I often see 80 ->90 MB /s out of the Raptor, where I only get about 55 -> 70 MB /s from the WD. When transfering 12 GB of files, this makes a big difference.

It might be helpful for your case if you could justify your position.

Max.

 

[Glenn Wolsey]

I plan to purchase a 74GB Raptor when I get a Mac Pro, the noise shouldn't be much of an issue as the tower will be kept under the desk, not on top of it.

To those complaining about noise, where is your tower located?

 

[bpd115]

I plan to purchase a 74GB Raptor when I get a Mac Pro, the noise shouldn't be much of an issue as the tower will be kept under the desk, not on top of it.

To those complaining about noise, where is your tower located?

74 GB is just not big enough for me for a boot drive. Either is 150. 2 drives in Raid is the way to go for space/performance.

 

[mustard]

I have been running dual 150gb Raptors in my mac pro since the day I got it with out a problem - and in a raid config it blazing fast.