Aftermarket Macpro Hardrives

[mhelm01]

Within the coming weeks I will be moving from a mpowered vista machine to LE on a mac pro which I have yet to purchase. I intend to get four hard drives with the mac but I would like to know if there are any superior after market options (which may cost less) than the hds that apple offers.

[nst7]

These and other products from this company are popular and work very well:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/sata/mac-pro

[flommer]

Originally Posted by mhelm01

Within the coming weeks I will be moving from a mpowered vista machine to LE on a mac pro which I have yet to purchase. I intend to get four hard drives with the mac but I would like to know if there are any superior after market options (which may cost less) than the hds that apple offers.

Yeah the choices from apple aren't the greatest..

WD Black Caviar SATA drives are great. Fast and reliable and reasonably priced. OCW does a better job of packaging so even though they are a little more expensive from them, don't buy them from newegg, whose handling of HardDrives in notoriously bad.

Don't buy any of the Green models as they have a low power mode that reduces plater speed. Not what you want in a HD for audio... In fact, stay away from any of the models that operate at less than 7200 RPM.

[idleave]

a few days ago i got a 3rd HD just for samples. got a WD black caviar 1TB for $99. works great and is super quiet.

[se.audio]

As a rule to help your workflow, Get the first hard drive (the one with your system on it) no bigger than 300GB so that it stays clean and accesses data fast. and load the three others with big 1TB or 1.5TB ones. 1 HD for your documents, sample libraries, etc, 1 HD for your Protools sessions, and the third for backup (might want to use the third one in RAID mode or something like that...)

[albee1952]

Pro Tools does not support RAID so skip that. I really like the WD Caviar BLACK. Their 32gb cache seems to give them an edge in performance. Most any SATA 3.5" 7200 rpm drive will go in there just fine(if in doubt about how to install them, a youtube search will turn up video tutorials on drive installation for Mac Pro).

[mhelm01]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Pro Tools does not support RAID so skip that. I really like the WD Caviar BLACK. Their 32gb cache seems to give them an edge in performance. Most any SATA 3.5" 7200 rpm drive will go in there just fine(if in doubt about how to install them, a youtube search will turn up video tutorials on drive installation for Mac Pro).

Thanks for the help. I know the macpros are supposed to have easy slide in trays for the hard drive slots.

[idleave]

its the easiest Hd to install. takes about 2 mins to screw the sled in and 5 sec tops to push in the drive. no wires... its a dream machine.