Western Digital Heads Up-"Caviar Green"

[buzzsmith]

I'm about to get another Mac hopefully in a few months and this really reminds me that I want to try and buy a solid state drive-- even if it's smaller. I cam move active projects over to SSD for speed.

So, yet another option.

Which SSD(s) are recommended? (or Velociraptors...are these also SSDs?)

2nd sophomoric question: Do they fit the Intel Xeon MacPro drive bays or, if not, how do they connect?
2b...which are Mac compatible? I found some that just displayed the Windows 7 icon.

I've looked at Western Digital's website and a few other SSD sites, but since this is all very new to me, I'm having some difficulties understanding the concept and hookup.

Thanks...

Buzzy

[Shooshie]

Velociraptors are just regular platter drives, but very good ones, and they run at 10,000 rpm. I've got two in my Mac.

I also have a 2TB Hitachi drive, which runs at 7200 rpm. I'm just trying to branch out from the Seagate/Maxtor/Western Digital/LaCie standards. I do have a Seagate 5900 rpm drive that is 2 TB in capacity, but I use it only for a backup boot drive (one small partition) and for Time Machine (a very large partition). I now wish I'd devoted the whole drive to Time Machine, because even the 1.84TB partition filled up, and suddenly Time Machine was deleting my old backups from months ago. I was kind of hoping to be able to use those for special purposes -- going back to a date and seeing a version of something. All of a sudden my oldest backup was about a week old. That's what happens when Time Machine fills up. Instead of asking you if you want to delete an old backup or cancel while you reconfigure what gets backed up, it deletes it then tells you what it did.

Anyway, the 5900 rpm drive is fine for Time Machine. So, I've got those drives running internally -- the 5900 rpm 2TB Barricuda, the 7200 rpm 2TB Hitachi, and 2 Velociraptors, in addition to the boot drive that came with the MacPro. I think the boot drive is a WD 250 GB drive. It may be 7200 rpm, but System Profiler mysteriously does not tell me the rotation speed of that drive. Hmm... Suspicious, eh? I'd like to replace that drive some day, but I just dread the installations!

Also, I've got a stable of Firewire 800 drives up over my desk. They range from 500 GB to 1 TB. They're WD My-Book drives, and frankly I don't trust 'em. They've all acted flakey at times, but they're still doing their jobs, so I don't complain. I figure they won't all go out on the same day, and they contain pretty redundant information.

Then there are the 5 Firewire 400 drives, which mostly stay switched off. They're just for deep-backup. Finally, there is the rack of DVD backups. That's REALLY deep backup, but you'd be surprised how often I use them. I have them indexed with DiskTracker -- old school indexing that doesn't look great, but is blindingly fast and totally reliable.

By the way, 2TB drives are fast, even when they run at 5900 rpm. Just do the math. The drives are the same size as 60 MB drives were 10 years ago, yet they hold thousands of times more information. Those sectors have to be awfully close together, thus 5900 rpm is laying down a ton of information in a single revolution.

But I do avoid the Caviar drives that run at variable speeds. I'm just the kind of guy who doesn't trust those things to work for high volume streaming on demand.

Shoosh

[newrigel]

I'm about to get another Mac hopefully in a few months and this really reminds me that I want to try and buy a solid state drive-- even if it's smaller. I cam move active projects over to SSD for speed.

They have some new PCIe SSD's that are scary fast! They are small capacities too just for audio sessions. Just copy your session off your storage drive to the PCIe SSD and away you go!

[newrigel]

I'm about to get another Mac hopefully in a few months and this really reminds me that I want to try and buy a solid state drive-- even if it's smaller. I cam move active projects over to SSD for speed.

So, yet another option.

Which SSD(s) are recommended? (or Velociraptors...are these also SSDs?)

2nd sophomoric question: Do they fit the Intel Xeon MacPro drive bays or, if not, how do they connect?
2b...which are Mac compatible? I found some that just displayed the Windows 7 icon.

I've looked at Western Digital's website and a few other SSD sites, but since this is all very new to me, I'm having some difficulties understanding the concept and hookup.

Thanks...

Buzzy

Hey buzz... check this out! This guy has some nice mods for the Mac Pros (and other macs too) but he has some slick ways to use the SATA controller that's already there instead of getting into an external RAID solutions. The SATA channels on the new Mac Pros can take anything you throw @ them, just depends on how much you want to spend! Your only alternative is to use Apples RAID card that only works through the PCIe channels to connect to the HD's... no other way to do it like the older Mac Pros. The backplane connects the drives through the PCIe... no cables leading to the drives from the RAID card like before. There's a big difference in the Nehalems an they make you spend $$ on a hardware RAID but Max Upgrades has some slick tricks up his sleeves to bring the RAID through the optical SATA channels... they scream! The optical SATA controllers are a special type of SATA channel for what I understand... a bit different than the HD bays, and can handle some massive bandwidth.

[pcm]

Hi Buzz-
fwiw I have heard green drives should be avoided for audio/video work,the way they conserve power seems to be counter productive for our particular needs.
I have been having good results w/ enterprise class 7200 rpm drives.
KG

Not just that, but the Green drives have a bad rep for reliability, period. Google it. I have a client that has/had a 2T version, and it died an ugly death.