Mac Pro :: Why No 15,000 RPM Drives On BTO Mac Pro?
Mar 24, 2009
Obviously, many don't go for Apple's drives, etc for pricing reasons, but does anyone know why Apple doesn't have 15,000 RPM drives as options (like they did for the previous Mac Pro line)?
I'm looking at the specs page for the MacBook Pro and it reads this...
Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive. Choose a hard drive with a faster speed for greater performance. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability.
Basically suggesting that the HDD option has a performance advantage over the SSD, but is this the case? I always thought SSDs could read & write quicker because they use solid-state flash memory as opposed to hard disks.
I want to go with the 256GB SSD but I want to know how it ranks in speed.
I have a question regarding Time Machine functionality. Here's my situation. I have two hard drives in my Pro: one that operates as a Boot drive, and one for storage. Right now I have Time Machine set up to backup my storage drive, but I was wondering if it was possible to have plug in a second external drive and use it to back up the Boot drive. I searched for a similar thread, but couldn't really find anything. Has anybody successfully done this?
I have infront of me a 2.8 Quad 2010 Mac pro with the 1tb drive that shipped with it, a further 1 tb caviar black and a 120gb OCZ Vertego 2 3.5' SSD.
Where do I start? I haven't even booted up the Mac pro yet. I would like the SSD to be the boot drive so it will require the OS installing somehow and my apps and the other 2 drives will hold my content such as FC studio and Logic Studio content and media files.
I want to install Windows 7 on a drive and don't know whether it's best to give it an entire drive or just a partition, whether to use Bootcamp or a VM such as Parallels.
So sorry, I have used Mac Pros before but I have never ever set one up and to be honest need someone to hold my hand through this!
HDD Bay 1: 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s; 7200 rpm; 8MB cache
OSX: Tiger
I need to upgrade to Snow Leopard to be able to use newer Leopard & above only versions of software ie FCP, Aperature, etc.
The issue is that I would like to keep the Tiger OSX as I run Pro Tools LE 7 on it. Upgrading to Snow Leopard would render Pro Tools LE 7 incompatible and I would have to buy it again.
So here's what I'm thinking. I would like to install a secondary HDD in Bay 2 and install Snow Leopard on it.
Is it possible to have OSX Tiger on the HDD in Bay 1 and have OSX Snow Leopard on the HDD Bay 2? Could they each be a different startup to be selected via System Preferences or at bootup? I would only want to run one OS at any given time.
If so what would be a workflow for installing the 2nd HDD and setting it up with OSX Snow Leopard.
Also, compatible hard drives for the 2006 Intel Mac Pros seem to be harder to find now. I called Apple and they no longer sell any compatible internal HDDs.
I see Seagate & WD have announced these but I'm struggling to find many available to order. Only the WD Green one appears to be even offered as an internal option. What is more it is more expensive buying the internal drive than buying the external USB one.
Has anyone bought one of these externals and stripped out the drive to put in their Mac Pro? I'm running out of space on my 1.5TB and swopping to 2TB hardly seems enough.
I need to create a virtual drive but dont want to buy lots of expensive software as Idont do this very often. basically I have an ISO I need to set as a drive (alcohol 120% would do this in PC world)
I'm planning on getting a Mac Pro with multiple hard drives and was thinking about having a main drive for Leopard and documents, one for music, one for video and another for Windows. I was just curious to see how others have theirs set up and any if there is advice to be shared.
I have an interesting problem in that my USB drives aren't mounting to the desktop. I've tried two separate flash drives and an external hard drive. When I check Disk Utility, I can highlight the drives and click 'mount' and the 'mount' button will darken for a few moments as though things are working but then the button just returns to its normal state and the drive still does not appear on the desktop. Despite this, Disk Utility's log shows the message 'Mount of "xxxx" succeeded' every time. Disk Utility sees the drives (obviously) and will verify them. Only mounting appears not to work. Meanwhile, I can plug my Wacom tablet into the very same USB port and it (the tablet) works perfectly. My iPods and iPhone will sync just fine from the same port. Why is this happening and, more to the point, what should I try in order to fix it? I know it's not a simple matter of restarting because I've done that a number of times already without success no matter what Disk Utility says.
Just got a new MacPro at my office (the end-of-life'd 8 core model) and my old MacPro is going to a coworker. Can I just take the drive out of my MacPro and stick it in the new MacPro and just be off and running? I mean, i've already done it and everything seems to be running ok. The only issues I'm seeing is that my Adobe CS3 software freaked out and deactivated and TimeMachine wants to start over - won't recognize my previous backup data
i am seriously considering using a software mirrored pair (RAID 1) of 1TB WD RE3 drives as an osx home drive. boot drive will be a discrete disk. another drive for windows. full backups weekly to an external drive.
space-wise, this should last me a long time. (lived with a G5 2x2.5 for four years and recently upgraded to an 8x2.8).
anyone out there tried this? satisfied with the performance and reliability? happy with the choice of western digital over seagate over?
What is everyones experience with the wd 2 tb internal drives for the mac pro. I'm planning on purchasing 6 and software raiding them and I've been reading reviews on sites like newegg that say they're not working out well for some people. So I wanted to know how it was going for those that purchased them for their macs.
I recently noticed that my DVD drives "hang" when I don't use them for extended periods of time, when I press the open tray button on the keyboard (or use the icon on the menu bar) the drive tries to open (I can hear the tray pull out slightly) but then it doesn't fully extend the tray (bay door on the chassis slightly open).
A reboot will not fix this issue but a complete shutdown of the system and power-up will, it is the same for both of my SATA drives.
Anyone else has experienced this issue in their system?
I'd ideally want the 256GB one but i want a great performance/storage ratio so i don't mind going for the others either. Also why the difference in price between the two Intels and is it justified?
Our dvd drive on our Power Mac 2x2.66 GHz Dual Core intel.The drive is an Optiarc dvd rw ad-717a: sometimes will not read inserted discs. These discs work ok when tried on our I mac. Other discs work fine. This has occurred with discs that have bee writen in the drive as well as supplied discs.
I bought two 1Tb Western Digital "My Book" drives. I have plugged them into my MacMini, but no matter what I do only one of them will mount at a time. I'm wanting to mount both so that I can create a RAID with them. Is there any reason why I can't mount both of them?
OWC used to included free software to benchmark drives, but they don't seem to do it anymore. Anyone have a link to a free drive speed test so I can see just where the SSD compares to the raptor and other drives?
So back in 2008 when I had a Penryn MacBook Pro, I could honestly tell the difference between using the MacBook Pro in Windows Vista vs. Mac OS X Leopard at the time. Not because they are different Operating Systems, but just by the quality of drivers Apple brings to Mac OS X vs. the crap that they bring to Windows.
But I don't understand it, particularly... I don't understand why we can't just not install Apple's crappy drivers, and go to each hardware component manufacturer's websites and download/install the default non-apple drivers ones and have the Mac run Windows just like a PC... not a Mac running Windows without running crappy drivers? Does this make sense?
I ask this because I am very interested in the MacBook Air, 13", but I also want to run Windows about 40% of the time so I am very confused on if I should buy it over the Lenovo X201 due to the terrible drivers Apple provides.
First replace the Optical drive (superdrive is superdead) in my 2007 macbook with a SSD, probably a 128-240GBish, the current internal drive is a 5400rpm 500GB. I want to install the OS and a couple of the main programs I use on the SSD. The main question is what will the the time capsule do when trying to restore to the (smaller GB )SSD if the backup image (currently around 400 GB) is from the 500GB. Is there a better way to go about this? The HDD has about 100GB available. If there is a forum on this let me know.
I have two external hard drives. First is Lacie 4big quadra. It is connected to my mac via FW800 Then I have a g-raid connected to the lacie via FW800. This all works fine. Both external drives have eSata. Is it possible to connect the two drives together via eSata to take advantage of the faster transfer speeds between the two drives? Even though the first drive is connected to the mac via FW800. I tried and the second drive didn't mount when connected via eSata.. but maybe I am doing something wrong.
I'm continually upgrading my drives to larger drives. While in the time being that is fine, but my disk space usage is also increasing. Rather than replacing my 2TB drives in a year for 4TB drives (or whatever size they may be), I'd love to add more drives.
Right now I have my 'backup' drives in an 8-bay SansDigital eSATA cage. This is fine for backups, but for simplicity and drive speed sake, I'd love to just add more drives to my machine. I'm using up all 5 available SATA ports on my 2010 MP. I don't use the Optical drive much, so got to thinking: what about putting my optical drive into an external firewire/USB housing and plug it in when I need to use it. This would free up one extra drive port, which would suffice for the next 2 years or so.
So, are they are good external casing's that will allow me to use my current MP SATA optical drive? Is this method bootable, what pitfalls might I run into?
I have 2 WD Caviar Black drives that are installed in my Mac Pro. Both show the exact same part number in Disk Utility, both are less than half full, both verify fine with Disk Utility. However one shows 125-130 MB/s RW with AJA and the other only delivers 90 MB/s. What gives? Just a sub-standard drive? THey are in adjacent bays in the MP, used as is - nothing changed. They are OEM drives thru Amazon from a few months ago. Both were erased and formatted prior to putting them in the MP a few weeks ago.