[rotuts]

My MPro is due next week

I found a 500GB SATAII 16MB buffer for 180 deliverd

today i found some 300GB SATA 16MB buffer for 80 deliverd.

then i realized I didn't know the difference if any on an SATA vs an SATAII

these will be my first SATA drives so id like to learn a little about them

my past comps G4 etc used ata100/133 etc

cheers and thanks

rotuts

[mac128k-1984]

SATA 1.5 Gb/s throughput
SATA II 3.0 Gb/s throughput

SATA II is backward compatible so you can hook up a slower drive but its slower.

[rotuts]

this is very helpfull

but I should have been a little more specific:

if the drive just says SATA than thats the slower 1.5 GB through put

I thought I read someshere that the bus on the MacPro was 3 GB but that current (unspecified) drives that you could buy now were nowhere near as fast.

so it would be worth it to wait until the SATAII drive drop in price rather than get SATA now for the MPro and its bus?

cheers and thansk again

rotut

[derekn]

You will get a speed increase with a SATA II drive, but how much is hard to say. The best analogy in regards to hard disk interface speeds is that they keep making the pipes bigger and bigger, but they keep filling them with dixie cups. LOL

I'd say go with the 500GB SATAII drive, the 16MB cache will help you out. If this will help, Barefeats just did a comparison of the fatest boot drives for the MacPro:
Best boot drive for the Mac Pro?

[rotuts]

great ref: Ive bookmarked it and will study it.

pls correct me if Im wrong, these seem to be SATA drives not SATAII?

My mPRO comes with the 250 default which im told is 8mb buffer. don't know if its an SATAII or not

I did buy a Maxtor 500GB SATAII 16MB for 179 delivered.

I plan to use CCCloner to move the boot to that drive.

I saw a special for 300 GB SATA for 80 delivered.

I though Id get that for lots of files I already have and do not access a lot
I have a large mpg cooking collection Ive collected over the years and will put it on that.

therefore even if these SATA are slower, that would be OK Id get a little more space and save about 40 on this weeks prices

what do you think?

cheers

rotuts

[derekn]

The drives tested by Barefeats are a mix of SATA I and II, handy for me since I'm going to be moving my Maxtor SATA I 300GB with a 16MB cache to my MacPro. It didn't do great in the tests but didn't do bad either, so that really shows the beneift of a 16MB cache (on a SATA I or II drive).

The 250 GB Apple ships is a SATA II, it will be either a Seagate or Western Digital and it does have an 8MB cache, so it's not the fastest drive around. That 500GB you're getting should help out a lot with bootup and especially stuff loaded from cache (Application startup, saves etc).

The 300 should be fine for just general storage. The 300 and 400 drives are really dropping in price, hopefully the 500s will follow soon with perpendicular recording drives coming out now.

[rotuts]

Great help again

i think Ill get the 2 x 300 and they will be storage.

down the pike i would be able to change them for something really really zippy and get a firewire box for them

have you seen this thread?

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...p;goto=newpost

it talks about actual through put and thats a little beyond me

these days is there any benefit of partitioning a large drive like the 500GB into two for speed issues?

cheers

rotut

[derekn]

Ah, havne't seen the thread, but it's been the same news for a long time. Drive interface speeds have never been the same actual drive performance. Doesn't matter if you're using SCSI, EIDE, ATA 33, 66 100 or 133 or Serial ATA. Maybe down the road, when flash memory based drives go up in capacity, we might see some closer speeds but right now, given the current technology, there are speed increases but we won't see actual interface speeds.

As for the partioning, I don't believe so, especially with overall speed of the MacPro. If your disk is severly fragmented or something you might see some performance increase, but nowadays, I don't believe it matters if you make 500 GB or 2 250GB partitions.

If you do want some extra speed though, you can RAID those two 300GB drives (RAIDs work best if the drives are all of the same capacity). Here's another link to the barefeats test of that:
Seagate 750GB and Hitachi 500GB four drive RAID 0 inside the Mac Pro

[mduell]

*scream* THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SATA II </scream> Please stop using that meaningless term.

The Serial ATA organization, SATA-IO, has a whole page dedicated to the standard naming.

Any 3.5" SATA drive will work in the Mac Pro.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by derekn

Maybe down the road, when flash memory based drives go up in capacity, we might see some closer speeds but right now, given the current technology, there are speed increases but we won't see actual interface speeds.

Actually, flash drives have a lower throughput than ordinary harddisks as flash chips are slower. The access times are an order of magnitude faster though, so for some applications, flash-based drives are faster.

Solid-state drives which you can also buy are based on regular RAM with a backup harddrive to permanently store the data. Then, you are able to saturate the bandwidth of most interfaces (the last benchmarks of solid state drives I have seen (a while ago) were that for a pci card with integrated ide controller; the card was able to saturate the pci bus, topping out at 100-110 MB/s).

[rotuts]

md
thanks for the ref that Ill study

no need to Im just refering to the way the drives were advertised. some are called SATA and some are called SATAII


thats what I was wondering about.

so they lie like a rug on the floor?

bet know one has heard that in a while

cheers rotuts

[reader50]

rotuts, where did you find a 500 GB drive for $180 delivered?

[rotuts]

the 180 drive deliverd was at frys outpost for one week

in went back up there for 280 or so

some have them for 200 now

vendor and brands varie

I go to dealnews.com from time to time

cheers

rotut