What drive in Mac Pro early 2008 or 2009?

The two drives were purchased from Amazon.

The first one was a WD Black and didn't work at all. I read the customer reviews and it seems I'm not the only one who got a defective WD drive. Apparently the Black model is also very noisy.

You say there is an unresolved bug in Disk Utility. What is the problem?

Maybe that is why it couldn't see the first drive. The first drive (WD Black) appeared in Disk Utilitiy as "media" and that's all. It couldn't see the info from the drive. So we never got anywhere with it and assumed it was a defective drive.

OK, thanks. Sorry I didn't keep that in mind.

So, I'm back where I started. Any old disk will do. But the two I tried didn't.

I'm not even looking for a cheap drive. I need one that will "just work" and not make me waste hours and hours for nothing.

On Apple's site, they sell a "1TB SATA Hard Disk Drive Kit for Mac Pro", but the requirements state that it needs a Mac Pro (mid 2010). Which I don't have. So I can't buy it and then complain.

My question remains: has anyone actually tried one of these recent 1TB drives (WD, or anything else) on these old Mac Pros?

Fine. I'll try that. I just ordered a Blue from Amazon and should get it tomorrow. I'll be back with the result.

Hopefully, three's a charm...

I ordered a WD Blue 1TB at about 5:15 PM yesterday and received it this morning at 8 AM. To get any faster, you'd need teleportation... This is Amazon France, by the way.

Oh, also, I ordered a Black at first because I wanted a very fast drive, as I'm using it for Photoshop's cache, among other things, like Aperture's database. I figure Blue will be faster than my old drive that was having hiccups anyway.

Got the new drive out of the box and into my Mac Pro Early 2008 in no time. It was immediately recognized and formatted in a couple of seconds, as is usual when things are going well. Disk Warrior was happy with it in a few minutes. I'm using it as I write this.

Thanks for your responses which encouraged me to keep at it. I was almost convinced that my machines were too old for the new drives. This idea was certainly partly Apple's fault with their inaccurate requirements on their site. One more drop of water added to the sea of reasons to be wary of what they say.

Till next time...

Yes, I'm aware that SSD is the way to go. I have one (OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD), 480 GB, as my boot disk. It has the system and all my apps, plus my virtual machines for Windows. These are used very little, only to check if things we put on the web are OK in the various Win Browsers. But they need to be fast because otherwise, I'll go nuts.

About using SSD for Photoshop's scratch, I seem to remember reading something saying that it will reduce the drive's life somewhat. I don't know how much or if it matters, or if it's the better choice anyway.

Actually, the reason we still have these old Mac Pros (two for work, one for the server) is that, every year, we hoped to see some major improvement and put off upgrading because we didn't feel the new ones announced year after year would change our life.

We've been using Macs for almost 30 years now. The first was a Mac Plus 512k, in January 1985. (My first computer (in 1981) was a ZX81, with 1k of RAM... I did get a 16 k plug in extension though). We usually upgrade when the specs show a speed improvement of at least 4X, or when the architecture changes radically. All this to say we are now waiting to spend all our Christmas money on some shiny new tubular Mac Pros. We will then have to reconsider our whole setup, and add some external Thunderbolt drives. At that time, I'll be back to discuss the best options. Till then, this will do.

And the reason we tried a Red was because we thought maybe we could use it later on a dedicated machine used only for music over the network. The drive is used just about continuously all day long. Bad idea obviously.

Thanks for the link. I knew I'd have to look for something like that, preferably before installing Mavericks. So you saved me some time.

To tell the truth, we used to be on the cutting edge and even installed some beta system software way back then. But not anymore. This time I'm actively watching what's going on with the Apple Mail/Gmail conundrum. I use both and they don't play well together anymore.

My husband (the guy using the other Early 2008 Mac Pro) has heard that Python breaks in Mavericks (some readline problem apparenly). He'll wait till it's fixed. He also uses ZFS... so he's in for a long wait, I'm afraid.

We're both waiting till Mavericks and all the others gets their stuff together.

What's this about TRIM? As far as I know (which isn't very far...) only Apple drives can use it. And I don't want to fiddle with low level stuff to get it to work on my non Apple SSD.