SATA 3.5 Drives for Mac Pro

You can do pretty well with anything you find here. If you're interested in speed, consider an SSDin combination with one of these if you have a 4,1 or 5,1 Mac Pro.

This Mac-Centric Vendor has many solutions for ThunderBolt attachment to the late 2013 Mac Pro, and also sells bare drives to mount on a sled in the older Mac Pro models. I reference their web page not because that are the "best in the business", but because they support their stuff, and products only stay in their catalog if they are trouble-free.

Use their collection as a Starting Point, a SAMPLE of what the market has to offer. It is perfectly reasonable to find a particular TYPE of device, and pursue similar types of devices from different vendors as part of your research. You may come back and buy one of theirs, or you may find another vendor has something more to your liking.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/

While it seems reasonable to use USB-3 drives, there is not enough bandwidth behind USB-3 in the late 2013 Mac Pro to support more than a small number of USB-3 drives at full speed. If you are editing Video or other I/O intensive work, you should avoid having all your data on USB-3 drives.

Remember that Mirrored RAID is NOT Backup. You still need a Backup, even if your data are stored on a Mirrored RAID.

So you can put SSDs which should be where your system resides, add PCIe SSD cards for scratch or graphics if you push the system with Lightroom or CS5 (or Aperture though that hit the EOL wall).

FBDIMMs can be important and help and luckily are cheap and excellent as can be, just I would avoid MacSales and look on Amazon for Mac Pro FBDIMMs.

Your system with just the SSD will feel better than ever, and 250GB go for $139 lately or less also on Amazon and work just fine in SATA II drive bays, I'd go with Samsung EVO line there. Best investment.

If you do need scratch drives SSD are perfect though might go with 500GB ($249) and use the 1TB drives for some backups and media files. Look for 2TB or above for TimeMachine or backups.

The "what SATA drive to recommend" - the answer varies when talking about intended use, and don't use the boot drive for other things - just the OS and apps, and a few programs need to use it for caching plugins or scratch but when possible reassign and do not use it for scratch, and definitely not for media files and most of your "home account" data.

Three basic needs and uses I see:

System / Scratch / TimeMachine / Lightroom or Aperture - and an PCIe SSD is not req'd for the system but can for scratch (and that way leaves you to use the four drive SATA bays for other uses).