What hard drive to buy for a MacPro?
 

I have a new MacPro with 4 hard drive slots. Getting ready to buy more storage. Will any eSata2 hard drive work? ANy advice?

Make sure its a western digital 7200rpm at least 500gig thats all you need.

eSata is just a connection that allows Sata storage external to the computer. Sata connectors were not designed to be attached/unattached repeatedly, so they came up with eSata.

For a drive, I wouldnt use less than 1TB. These big drives have high density which means a lot of data moving under the head per unit of time and will be faster than most lower capacity drives. Prices are so low that there's not much savings with smaller drives. For a high performance drive I suggest the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black. This drives makes a little noise, but I kinda like that.

For $25 less the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB is under $100. I've been using these for external storage and backup. Nice fast drives.

With 1 TB drives you might want to partition into two volumes. The first partition will be very fast and can be used for reading, rendering, or scratch. The second partition could be used for storage of finished videos and other media.

Seagate makes a 1.5TB drive. But it has had problems.

Just bought one today:

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

Hands down the best!

-Steve

How much noise and why do you like that?

Hard-disk manufacturers constantly push each other in and out of the top-spots for reliability and speed benchmarks. One of the best places to find great prices and uber-cheap delivery costs is OWC:

Find the latest Performance Upgrades, Firewire and USB Hard Drives, SATA, Memory, Laptop Battery, and more at OWC

For the past 2 years Seagate and Hitachi have been nudging each other for top-dog status in HDD's. The latest crop of Seagate 1TB 7200.11/12 drives (Enterprise-class or not) have been consistently testing at slightly over 100 MB/s and so have the Hitiachis. They are also near-silent in operation.

And Mike brings up a curious but important point when it comes to added noise from a HDD - or any source in a edit suite: You don't want any. The quieter the environment the better both for the editors nerves and the more accurately you'll hear your project soundbed/audio.

Exactly, which is why the statement "makes a little noise, but I kinda like that" begs to be clarified.

On macs without status lights it's nice to know that the machine is working and not stalled. I find drive noise and some fan noise to be white noise - it doesn't bother me.

That's what I figured the answer was, some form of feedback as a "feel good" device that things are working.

This may be comforting to you Don, but I want to reiterate to others that added noise in an editing environment is not preferred and in fact is the very reason that all professional edit suites are purposely designed to minimize the peripheral noise footprint as much as possible.

Case in point: One of the reasons we went to a Fiber external array is because the cable-run length for fiber can be up to 2 kilometers (sounds crazy, right?), that enabled us to put the big noisy enclosure in a physically different room thereby keeping all the drive/fan noise completely separated from the edit suite.

In fact in my home-office I've even setup Auralex foam to reduce background reflections to keep things as sonically dead as possible.

Western Digital Black Caviar 1TB as boot drive
 

Just got one of the Western Digital 1TB drives. I assume you meant to use it as a boot disk? Right now I've got 2 Seagates, a 250GB for the boot drive and a 750GB drive for media. Think it will be worth it in terms of improved performance to switch over and use the WD 1TB as the boot drive?

SSD as boot disk...
 

There's been cosiderable chatter about using a Solid State Disk for your boot disk. Being non-mechanical the read/write times are better, and since it's your boot drive, you shouldn't be loading it with footage or templates, etc. It'll save you initial start up time as well as opening programs time, which helps in a professional environment. I'm still investigating the options and best choices for a Mac Pro, but I think I may go that route eventually. Prices are coming down on SSD's, so when I can get a decent capacity drive for a good price I may jump in.

I can not recommend Western Digital drives. I've just has too many problems with them. Seagate has been for years, the drive of choice for reliability, until the last batches of 1 and 1.5TB drives. they seem to have it fixed now though.

I've been using a lot more Samsung drives and so far, so good. I've got a couple of much older 160G samsung drives in a PC still running fine.

as for noise, why on earth do you even have the machine in the room ? I banished all CPU's and external drives from the edit rooms years ago. once you do that, it doesn't matter if they are noisy or not. I've been in some edit rooms where its like sitting next to a running jet engine. how can you mix, how can you even concentrate on your work ?

with DVI and USB its very easy to extend the cable 10-20ft and get your CPu's out of the room. very cheap investment with a big return.