Internal Hard Drives for Mac Pro

Any standard SATA drive will work. Just mount on the sled and slide in place. Performance of 7200 RPM drives will be very similar all other things being equal. Seagate's XT drives are hybrids incorporating a small amount of SSD on the drive that can improve throughput hence the higher cost (although twice the price for a 10-20% performance boost seems extravagant.)

You can look for reviews and benchmarks at Bare Feats, Storage Review, and Tom's Hardware Review.

Add this to your list:
Recommended hard drives for Mac Pro
http://macperformanceguide.com/Recommended-MacPro-HardDrives.html

http://macperformanceguide.com

I also have two WB Caviar Black 2TB drives in mine.

Just curious how you plan to back up. I have a lot of cache files due to video editing, surely these change all the time, so backups would grow and grow, unless you just do a sync rather than incremental.

I have two 2 of the TB Hitachi 7K200 in my Mac Pro and I have been quite satisfied with them. I have also used the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB, and the Western Digital Caviar 1 TB, and I have experienced no discernible difference between either of them and the Hitachi.

Quick question: Although any SATA HD should do. This page says (in swedish) that the harddrive requires the Mac Pro mid 2010 model. Wouldn't this work in my early 2008 model? http://store.apple.com/se/product/MC729ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&mco=MTg2OTg0NTM&s=a lpha#overview

There is another harddrive on the same page with my model or the late 2006 model as requirement, but the price is more than the double (3240 kr vs. 1495 kr).

Would I have to buy the expensive one?

Don't listen to those system requirements, take with grain of salt, they are never updated and only serve to confuse people.

There is no size limit either when Apple moved to GUID that solved the issue with drives of 2TB and larger that otherwise would have been a problem in older systems.

And 10.5.6 and later support new 4k sectors found on more drives and will be standard in 2011 for almost if not all drives.

So taking the 'writing on the wall' about needing 2010 as lazy misinformed. It would even work in 2005 G5, and Apple price on drives cost too much.

About the only time to be concerned is if using Apple Pro RAID card and SAS drives, maybe.

The hatter wrote:
Don't listen to those system requirements, take with grain of salt, they are never updated and only serve to confuse people.

There is no size limit either when Apple moved to GUID that solved the issue with drives of 2TB and larger that otherwise would have been a problem in older systems.

And 10.5.6 and later support new 4k sectors found on more drives and will be standard in 2011 for almost if not all drives.

So taking the 'writing on the wall' about needing 2010 as lazy misinformed. It would even work in 2005 G5, and Apple price on drives cost too much.

About the only time to be concerned is if using Apple Pro RAID card and SAS drives, maybe.

Thank you so much for this respone! It was just the answer I was hoping for 🙂

My current favored 2 TB HD's are the WD Caviar Black for performance (followed closely by the Hitachi) and the Samsung Spinpoint 5400 RPM for backup/Time Machine. The Samsungs are very quiet, cool nad quite fast considering the 5400 RPM platter speed. They are also dirt cheap (at least in the US) right now - $89 from newegg.