I have been reading about people taking a SSD drive for Boot and OS and using a second HD for their data using MCE's Optibay hard drive enclosure.
I would love to go this way but I can't justify spending all the cash on a SSD yet. Could I put in 2 500GB 7200 rpm drives and RAID 0 them? I know this wont be as fast as SSD but it should be faster than a single hard drive and hold a lot more storage for less $$$.
as topic states, what do you think the difference in power consumption between 5400rpm and 7200 rpm?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI lean to the standard drive at 5400 rpm. Why? All my video editing is done with an external firewire drive, and I think the 7200 generates more heat than the 5400.
For web design I don't see how a 7200 speed is much of a benefit, considering the extra heat generated may negate the benefit of a faster drive. I think heat (and dust) is the bane of all electronics.
I'm fixing to order the 15" i7 and will use it for running Adobe CS5 web suite. Final Cut Pro for video- and will use a firewire drive.
I want to replace my 3 year old drives before it's too late.
I have about 200 gigs of data, split between a pair of Seagate Baracuda 7200rpm drives I bought 3 years ago.
I am thinking on going with a single 500 gig drive for my data, and I can't decide between a Caviar Black, or a Baracuda 7200.12.
I have read that the Caviar Black have incredible performance, , but only for the 1TB since it has 3 platters.
How do the 500gig models compare between WD and Seagate? I just don't have the need for more. My OS and Apps are on the SSD at 23 gigs, and all the rest of my work/personal files take up about 200 gigs.
Which is going to be better, the Black, or the Baracuda? 500 gig models only.
I currently have a 2TB WD mirror edition that is setup in RAID 1 so it will mirror all my data. Now I also have a bunch of other drives laying around which I also feel the need to back up and currently I am doing this by doing a whole bunch of dragging and dropping and copying and pasting etc etc etc and this is making me very tired. I know that a setup is possible in disk utility but I am not at all sure about how to configure it so I wont lose any of my data.
Some details about my setup:
Mac OS X 10.5.6
PowerPc G5
Harddrives: two 1TB WD MyBooks, and two 500gig WD Mybooks --> these pairs need to mirror each other and make my life less of a hassle.
So I have a Mac Pro with Bay 1 acting as my regular start up drive. I also have three other Western Digital 500GB hard drives that I have been using as a RAID backup system. However, when I place all three of the RAID hard drives into Bays 2, 3, and 4, the computer will not boot. It never reaches the Apple logo, and continually tries to restart. So I figured one of the hard drives was corrupt.
However, I have tested all three hard drives in Bay 2 and the computer will boot just fine. I have also tested each bay individually (i.e. the same RAID hard drive in each of the Bays seperately) and the computer still boots fine. I can even power up with any two hard drives in Bays 2 and 3. The only time I can't power up is when all three of the hard drives are occupying all three of the extra bays.
Also, none of the RAID hard drives show up in Disk Utility or on the desktop. Shouldn't I be able to view them as normal internal or external hard drives being plugged into my Mac? They do show up in RAID Utility. Is this normal with RAID hard drives, or should they always show up in Disk Utility?
I created a new RAID backup with two of the drives together (Bays 2 and 3) and it recognizes it in System profiler. However, I want to be able to use all three drives for the RAID.
Info:
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
What is, in theory, the fastest raid type, when I use two hard drives.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have read that it is "a shortcut to disaster" if I do a RAID0 (or any other RAID for that matter), if the Hard Drives are dissimilar. I have the original HD 149GB (now 5 years old), and have bought a new 1T HD, and was planning on setting them up as a striped RAID0. Is this a bad idea? Should I purchase a second 1T HD and do a RAID0 or RAID1 setup instead?
View 10 Replies View RelatedI have a Mac Pro with all hard drive slots filled. The first two disks (includes startup disk) are independent, and 3 and 4 are set up in a RAID 1 mirror. I have to take my computer into the Apple store for a repair and I'd like to just take out all the disks except for my startup disk... however I'm not sure how to go about doing so for the RAID. If I take the drives out, and boot up the computer with them no longer inside, will the computer "freak out" and/or will the computer no longer recognize the RAID if I put them back in again later?
If the latter is the case, will the data be lost or would I just have to set up the RAID again... and if I do that, will that also cause the data on the drives to be lost, or is it possible for it to mirror them again without needing to make changes to the data?
What should I be doing to my drives before building arrays with them?
Hitachi do a Drive Fitness Test and Seagate something similar but I have not been able to get either to work on a BootCamp Windows partition.
I tried formatting in Disk Utility and pulling some data on and off. I'm now running a scan for bad blocks in Drive Genius (is this worth it? It's going to take about a week at this rate). Anything else I should do?
I'm thinking about getting a Mac Pro tower from apple, and then buying two 500gb hard drives to place them in a raid 0 config. My question is, is setting up raid as easy as taking out the existing hard drive, placing both the new drives into the mac pro, and selecting raid 0 from OSX when I reinstall the operating system?? Or does the Mac have something similar to a Bios setup where I select that?
View 24 Replies View RelatedI just got a used mac pro quad. I plan to use it for video production- final cut pro, pics - aperture, and music production- protools. THe computer came with 3 - 10k rpm 160g hd's. Two of them are set up as a raid 0. I like the idea of having a faster drive as a boot drive, but 160 seems kind of small to me as the drive to run memory hungry apps and the operating system. Am I right? I could go to a 300g 10k rpm drive. I am also thinking about getting a bigger drive, say a 750g or 1 tb 7200 rpm. Should I use this as the boot drive or as a secondary storage drive?. If it's the boot drive should I add the other 160g 10k drive to the raid or keep it separate? I assume that neither way would be wrong, nor create a problem, but since I haven't put anything on it yet, I'm wondering what would be the most efficient way to manage my files and get the most out of my computer.
View 16 Replies View RelatedSince upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7.4 I am unable to mount any of my G-Tech Raid hard drives.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
So I have my new MBP specced out ready for Jobbsy's announcement 26 Jan, principally including 7200 rpm drive - and now I find they're dodgy! I particularly wanted a fast drive for music production but I gather they're glitchy in a bad way. Are they all bad?
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have a macpro with 4 x 1tb drives
Is it possible to get a highpoint raid controller and put those 4 drives in a raid 5 array (and then create partitions inside that array) - or do you need to have 1 drive by itself for the operating system, and then create a raid array using the remaining 3 drives?
Lastly, are the highpoint 3500 series a decent card? and fully compatible?
anyone heard? i thought they were supposed to be out by Q4 of 08 and today is the last day of 08
View 9 Replies View RelatedI've read all the horror stories about how the mid-09 MBP hard drive firmware update and non-Apple 7200 RPM HDDs don't get along. Most of these seem to be related to the use of a SATA 3.0 drive (which shouldn't matter, since mechanical hard drives can't even make use of the full SATA 1.5, but I digress).
I'm about to buy a new Mac, and, even though the Macbook, which doesn't seem to have these problems, would suit my needs just fine (my camcorder is USB and my digital cameras both use CF), I might spring for the MBP anyway (likely to get the additional 2" of screen space on the low-end 15", which has the closest resolution to what I am used to on my outgoing T60).
Obviously, I could pay Apple to upgrade to one of their 7200 RPM drives, assuming I get the 15". But that seems silly, since I can buy, for less than $100 (i.e., half the upgrade cost from Apple, plus I keep the old drive), a Hitachi Travelstar 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 drive. My questions are:
1) Has anybody successfully upgraded to such a drive (or its 320 GB little brother, which is otherwise speced the same) in a mid-2009 MBP?
2) If so, did you have to downgrade the firmware as suggested in these forums?
3) If so, did you have to "tweak" the drive in any fashion to make it work?
Does anyone know what drives apple uses for their 7200RPM 500GB drives?
View 2 Replies View RelatedOk dont know if i made a good choice because i just got to0 anxious and jumped on it. plus i had money burning holes in my pockets after selling off a lot of old gear. Heres the deal yo. maybe a long thread, sorry.
Before i get into the dual drive thing.
I am a photographer, i work on multi layer large psd files that get in the gig range sometime. I have an HD camcorder as well and want to start doing some video work. I doubt ill get into it much, but I WOULD LIKE TO AT LEAST VIEW AVCHD FILES OR AT LEAST CONVERT A 2 MINUTE VIDEO FASTER THAN 20 MINUTES. (i really dont know much about video, but i record 30fps.)
Anyways. I currently have the first macbook pro 17" 2.16ghz maxed ram 2gb ati radeon x1600 with 256ram and 100gb 7200 hd. Mac osx 10.4. I use it with external display to do all my editing. i keep all files on external 7200 firewire 800 drives.
So I decided to go with a refurbed macbook pro 13" 2.53ghz unibody with 4gb ram (8gb future upgrade), and the 9400m nvidia graphics and 5400 250gb hd.
And here is a list for my reasoning. (i already bought it)
-I am worried about running into snow leopard problems with my CS3 suite so this model runs 10.5 leopard. I hear theres really no problems with cs3 on it.
-i dont want to spend 800 bucks on the cs3 upgrade, for now. plus i cant afford that too.
-i had a budget of about $1200 max for the computer. other money going towards photo equipment upgrades.
-i got it from apple directly. i was looking at ebay forever and i could have gotten a better deal on a better computer, but i just worried about that, even though i have sold and bought lots of stuff from there.
-im getting kinda tired of lugging around a huge 17" laptop. (my backpack with camera gear ends up being over 80 pounds. haha, i know it wont do much, but still) I do like more desk room when im at my desk. it gets crowded with the macbook, display, external keyboard and pen tablet and speakers and printers.
-i am probably going to sell my 17" on ebay after i receive my new 13" and set it up. i could get up to $600 for it, it seems. its only going to bring me less money if i wait longer to sell it. (kinda sad that over 3 grand is only worth 600 bucks now)
So did i make a good choice? i mean it doesn't seem i could have done much better unless i went for a desktop or took a risk on ebay.
Ok now to the dual drive thing.
i dont like the idea of the 5400 hard drive in the new 13". so i want to upgrade it to a 7200. i came across those seagate momentus hybrid ssd drives 500gb at 7200. I will most likely get one of those.
then i came across the whole thing of changing out the optical drive with a second hardrive. then i was like why not put another one of those hybrid ssd momentus in there.
i remember working on the computers in college that had dual 500gb drives, and one was completely dedicated to scratch. maybe overkill, but that machine killed. of course it was a mac pro though or maybe it was a g5, but still.
when i got my 17" macbook pro, i used the optical drive for 3 days non stop importing cds into my first itunes library. then. i never used the optical drive again, ever. however if i order the dual drive thing from mec they give you a free external enclosure for the optidrive you remove.
what i am wondering is can the macbook pro 13" handle 2x 7200 drives. as in power and heat? I know people say they handle dual drives. but just wanting to make sure.
I recently picked up a couple of external drives, and decided to benchmark them to determine whether the interface and/or drive type made much of a difference. For those that don't want to read the details, here's the bottom line: If you're going to splurge on a FW800 interface, it's well worth fitting this with a 7200 rpm drive to maximize performance. Uncached sequential writes over FW800 were twice as fast on the 7200 rpm drive compared to the 5400 rpm. FW800 is a marked improvement over USB 2.0 as well. Full results are below. For background, when shopping for drives, I was interested in using the FW800 interface on the MBPs, for the simple reason it's rated almost twice as fast as USB 2.0. Some of the drives I was shopping for included 7200 rpm drives. My first thought was this was silly, since the interface limited the throughput to far-below the limits a 5400 rpm drive could produce, so why bother upgrading to 7200 rpm? Well, it turns out it does make a difference. I've got both a FW800 enclosure (G Drive Mini) and a USB 2.0 interface (Nexstar TX) as well as a 320GB 7200 rpm drive (Hitachi) and a 640GB 5400 rpm drive (Western Digital). So, I benchmarked both drives using both interfaces. Some interesting results! Turns out, the 7200 rpm drive does in fact dramatically improve performance in the FW800 interface. For sequential operations, Firewire has a dramatic improvement over USB 2.0; for random read/writes, drive speed seems to be a more important factor. And for large files, the combination of Firewire and 7200 rpm gives a pretty impressive throughput of almost 75MB/s. Full results are below. Note that the drive and interface are noted in the title bar for each drive.
View 18 Replies View RelatedI'm looking to upgrade my MPB 17 2.33 GHz model with one of the new 2.5 SATA 320G 7200 RPM drives from either Hitachi, Seagate or Western Digital.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI'm thinking of getting a refurb MBP but they come with a 5400rpm hard drive and I want a 7200rpm. Does anyone about how easy it is to replace the internal hard drive in a MBP and how much it would cost?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI am planning to buy the New 13inch MacBok Pro that came out this July. Is there a possibilty of upgrading the Hard drive to 7200 rpm like the way I did it in the old model. I have had news that its not possible to upgrade this machine as we did the previous one.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1)
The time has come to move to a RAID setup in my Mac Pro. Ideally I'd like to run 4 1.5TB SATA drives in a RAID 5 or 10. It seems there are a LOT of threads on this topic all filled with different information, so I have a few questions...
Which RAID cards are bootable?
Do any work like the Apple card and interface with the drives through the logic board?
If not, how do you connect the internal drives to the RAID card in their stock bay locations?
I just got a brand new MAC PRO desktop. It came with a 600GB HDD. I purchased a second identical internal 600GB HDD. I wanted to do setup a RAID 1 using these 2 drives. Currently the main drive has the OS and all my other apps installed. I installed the 2nd drive and was fooling with disk utility. I'm not sure how to set this up however. I tried numerous guides online but I just cant figure it out.
MAC PRO (takes up to 4 internal drives) - currently installed 2 identical drives
Leopard
Using Disk utility
The RAID tab says "online" and the status is green (indicating the RAID is working). However on my desktop i see the 2nd hardddrive mounted with no contents in it. I just want to able to use the 2nd drive as a mirror so this way if one fails I'm still up and running.
I just got the apple mac pro raid card today, but after I connect it and all 4 SAS drives, the MAC OSX Installtion program can not detect the SAS at all, I open the RAID Utility but no dirve there, the battery is in charging status.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI'm about to configure my 2006 MP with one of Apple's RAID cards using RAID5. I currently have 4x 750GB drives that I can use, but I can see needing more space in the not too distant future. When I do need more space, can I simply drop in a 2TB drive, let the RAID system reconfigure itself, and repeat this until I have all 4 drives in place? Is there a better or different way to do this? I know that if one of the drives is larger than the others, then only a drive space equivalent to the smaller drives will be used in RAID5. After addition of the fourth drive (per the above scheme), will the array then use the full 2TB of each drive?
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have a 8-core MP 2.8Ghz with 10gb ram and Ati 2600HD. I'll someday replace the ATI with a quadro (all my application is 3d/CAD/Design) I'm installing 4 of the WD640 drives, they arrive on Friday.
I would love to order the CalDigit RAID card but after searching I finally figured out it's not available until next month.
That said, I need my system to start working ASAP and I don't want to wait if I don't have to.
I'm a designer, I need fast scratch so some striping needs to be involved. I also need data protection. At this capacity Time Machine isn't going to be of any use and I'd prefer redundancy anyway.
The 4 WD640s are replacing: 1 750gb 7200.11, 2 WD SE16 500GBs, and 1 320GB (Apple Stock Drive).
I would like to sell some of those drives to defray the cost of this endeavor but I'm open to keeping 1 or possibly 2 as external drives or stuffing one into the optical bay with a converter.
I want speed and reliability, of course! But really the largest motivator here is the combined drive aspect. Having so many volumes is driving me nuts.
My intention had been RAID 5 or 6 but I now know that Apple Software RAID can't do this. So now it seems with software RAID 0+1 would be the only option.
Realistically, does the cpu performance degradation outweight the speed gained from striping the drives? It's so difficult to determine bottlenecks.
Any thoughts on my best bet without/before the RAID card arrives. Can I migrate the array after installing the card without data loss?
If I just JBOD the drives can the concatenated set be broken up ever? I was thinking I could JBOD until the card came.
Anyone know if it's possible to attach two USB hard drives to a Time Capsule via a USB hub, and configure them in a RAID1 configuration and use them as my Time Machine backup disk? I would then use the TCs internal drive as network storage.
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have a bunch of Mac Computers here and I want to make a file server for them with about 5 drives in an RAID array to be a little bit secure. I am fairly certain how to go about and build myself a basic file server for a bunch of PCs networked together, but I am not sure about how to do it for a network of Macs.
View 1 Replies View Related