2008 Mac Pro Hard Drive Upgrade?

Just buy the new WD Black, it has 64MB cache and performs nicely - replaced my 2008 era of same 1TB

Larger 2TB have high I/O due to high density, and there are the 4TB Hitachi Enterprise $399 each.

I would not buy older versions. No reason to.

It is only with SSDs that you reach or can't fully utilize their specs. And these are specs. Even that 4TB drive is still in the 200MB/sec and under range.

Most buyers don't have or need a 6G controller except with the new SSDs.

The interface is all SATA regardless.

The hatter is correct that 6GB/sec and 3GB/sec are all specsmanship for rotating drives.

Typical-sized drives can transfer data off the platters at about 100 to 125 MB/sec. Although you may be able to write some data into its cache slightly faster, it does not do 3GB/sec steady-state.

"A chain is as strong as its weakest Link" and the weak link (the bottleneck) is from the platters to the drive cache.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0036Q7MV0/

The new 64MB cache and new specs do matter. They are designed and built with smart dual DSP firnmware.

It is specifications and support. It is not marketing spiel.

1TB Black 2008: 105MB/sec 32MB/cache

2012 (Jan): 1TB Black: 140MB/sec. 64MB/cache

Otherwise you would be usinig drives with 8 or 16MB cache and 65-70MB/sec still.

You didn't use SCSI. We had 40 then 80 and later there was 160 and 320MMB/sec PER CHANNEL and with multiple drives on the channel.

The drive support for the motherboard and controller. Your Mac has 4 drives sharing one common controller (SATA2 but limited to about 800MB/sec)

If you want an SSD and you want a bootable PCIe controller, that makes sense and is an upgrade investment worth the research.

Shared 800MB, but 'only' 250 per drive bay.

If it was fully SATA2 it would have 1.2GB/sec controller.

SSDs are pushing the envelope.

WD has 10K VelociRaptor in 250-500-1TB size and 200MB/sec.

So for spindle drives you are fine but people are pushing for more, using more than just one SSD and wanting to get the full flavor of one or more - SSD's today are capable of 550MB/sec for just the one drive, more than a Mac Pro offers - unless you add a controller to use.

More about that and upgrades on the blog and articles link on Dlloyd's

http://www.macperformanceguide.com

But just buy the newest drive. One for system, one for data, two for backups.... and put them to use.