I have a Mac Pro with 2 x 3 GHz Dual cores. I bought the machine with two 500 gigabyte SATA drives. I want to add a third 400 or 500 gigabyte drive for storage only. The technical part of adding the drive seems easy. What I am lost on is what drive to select in terms of brand type that would be compatible with my machine. I have the latest firmware. Apple want $400 which seems outrageous. What is the most reliable brand? Please provide details. Thank you.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I agree with Andrew on the Seagate. I would use them or Hitachi, and avoid Western Digital, but those are just my personal preferences having had some issues with WD drives. I'm sure you are aware that reliability is just a statistical measure, and every manufacturer has drives that fail. If you happen to get one of the ones that fails early (and, as has been said a thousand times, "all drives fail, it is just a question of when!") then for you that manufacturer is very unreliable.
As far as which model to choose, pretty much any SATA I or SATA II drive will work. If you are not too sure what you are doing, then you might want to use someone like Other World Computing. They specialize in Macs, and even have some Mac specific drives on special at the moment (see quote from one of their e-mails below) and have a pretty helpful website aimed specifically at your machine.
Brand new with Genuine Apple Rom/Firmware, we have Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM
SATA I/II 16MB Cache Hard Drives now in stock.
500GB Seagate/Apple Barracuda 7200.9 16MB Cache SATA I/II HD $109.00
That's $10.99 off reg!
750GB Seagate/Apple Barracuda 7200.10 16MB Cache SATA I/II HD $199.50
That's $8.49 off reg!
500GB Maxtor/Seagate 7200RPM 16MB SATA I/II Enterprise HD $99.00
Brand New, 5 Year Seagate Factory Warranty, Enterprise Reliability
500GB Maxtor Bundled with ProSoft DataBackup III ($59 retail Value) $117.50
Utilities above can help you recover data, but having good backups makes for
a good night's sleep.
***Note, Apple 500GB and 750GB drives are available while supplies last.
Maxtor Enterprise 500GB $99/$117.50 special pricing ends August 31st***
Thanks David - I went ahead and ordered the Seagate. Two other questions: Any idea why Apple charges so much or is that just Apple? Any advice on formatting? Thanks again. Martin
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I have a Mac Pro with 2 x 3 GHz Dual cores. I bought the machine with two 500 gigabyte SATA drives. I want to add a third 400 or 500 gigabyte drive for storage only. The technical part of adding the drive seems easy. What I am lost on is what drive to select in terms of brand type that would be compatible with my machine. I have the latest firmware. Apple want $400 which seems outrageous. What is the most reliable brand? Please provide details. Thank you.
For questions like this, barefeats.com offers a wealth of information.
If you are going to stripe the drives, you should MATCH the existing drives; do not mix brands or models.
Linear Mode
