Internal Hard Drive Recommendations
 

Im looking for a cost effective 500 gb internal to add to my Intel Mac Pro (2 x 3 GHz quad core xeon). I found the Apple drive through B&H. Any recommendations on comparable reliable units that don't sacrifice speed. I tried to use my system profiler to get the current drive specs but didn't see them there.

The 'sweet spot' for best value for hard disks is now with the 1TB drives. People generally have prejudices on what brand to buy depending on their own experience of having a drive die at some time but in truth they are all pretty much the same. You need a 7200rpm drive but whether it's a Samsung, Hitachi, Western Digital or whatever makes no difference.

You will find your current disks enumerated in System Profiler under Serial-ATA unless you have a RAID card in which case they will be listed under Hardware RAID.

Hello Ryan,
Here's my MacPro config, I have five Segate Barracuda 1.5TB 7200 drives one is for the system drive and the other four are striped into two pairs raid 0 which gives you 6 TB for capture. This combination work very well.

I use Hitachi/IBM SATA drives from Other World Computing. Very reliable drives at good prices with great service.

Keep this in mind when building an edit system: Always assume that the RAID you're working on is going to crash that day. And if it did, where's your backup?

I always have a full backup of my current project on a mirrored RAID, as well as archives of original camera footage.

I heard a story about a producer who lost an entire season of HD work when a RAID went down. No backups except what was exported earlier onto standard-definition tapes.

So whatever the max capacity of your edit system, make sure you have enough capacity to make a backup of all the projects and media.