[Baburao786]

Hi....I am looking into buying a new Mac Pro and have a few questions about the hard drives? Before I proceed with my questions, I wanted to state that I am looking to buy a Mac Pro primarily for professional video editing purposes and graphics design. I am a newbie when it comes to hardware configuration so any help would be appreciated

1. I am looking into buying a new Mac PRO; however instead of getting all the hard drives from APPLE, I am just going to get one 500gb hard drive and fill the 3 slots with my own SATA 2 drives. I am comfortable doing that; however the question I have is that if I do put in the hard drives myself...is it as simple as plug and play or do I have to configure it into some sort of a RAID. I am not too comfortable with configuring RAIDS...I thought you would only need RAIDS in a server environment. Pretty much all I'll be doing from the other hard drives would be editing and storage thats it...nothing more...all my applications will be installed in the main drive.

2. Which company's hard drives do the mac pro come with? In addition, can you recommend any good SATA 2 500Gb hard drives

3. I know Intel is showing off their quad core chip...just wondering if you guys think how soon before Macs decide to put in 8 cores (4 x 2).....

[derekn]

Okay #1... If you don't want a RAID, don't run one. Simple as that. You will get a lot of speed from a RAID, you can see the results of a RAID here: Seagate 750GB and Hitachi 500GB four drive RAID 0 inside the Mac Pro

But just leaving the drives as is will be fine, you just screw them into the drive sleds, startup and format them as MacOS (Journaled). If you get a fast drive for a bootup drive, you'll have to format it as GUID which is found under the Partition tab in Disk Utility.

2. Your mileage will vary, some come with Seagate and others come with Western Digital, I believe I even saw some reports of Hitachi drvies as well. It's whatever they have sitting around in the factory at the time. As for good 500GB drive, I'd recommend Seagate personally, their drives come with a solid 5 year warranty and their drive quaity is really good.

3. Intel has targeted November for their quad core chips, so it's a pretty good guess we'll see them in MacPros around MacWorld San Francisco maybe. But given how Apple likes to make announcements when it wants and not at the major tradeshows as has been done in the past (that was the only time they had major press attention), they may just silently upgrade it before or after MacWorld. For what it's worth, the processors in the MacPro are in sockets, so it may be a simple case of just buying a Quadcore processor from Newegg or someplace like that and just slipping it in. It by no means would be officially supported by Apple of course.

[Rolling Musubi]

Originally Posted by Baburao786

I am comfortable doing that; however the question I have is that if I do put in the hard drives myself...is it as simple as plug and play or do I have to configure it into some sort of a RAID.

Configuring drives to be used in a RAID is optional. The most basic step once your new drives are installed is to initialize and optionally partition the disk. From the sound of your needs, this is about all you need to do.

2. Which company's hard drives do the mac pro come with? In addition, can you recommend any good SATA 2 500Gb hard drives

So far, most seem to be Western Digital Caviars. As far as recommendation, can't really say since I don't have any 500GB drives to have formed any sort of personal opinion on.

3. I know Intel is showing off their quad core chip...just wondering if you guys think how soon before Macs decide to put in 8 cores (4 x 2).....

From what I've read, Clovertown (expected to be released towards the end of 2006 as early as November) will be marketed as an extreme edition of the Xeon 51xx series and I would guess that Apple would only offer it as an expensive CTO option as opposed to pushing the whole line to that processor. Clovertown is sort of a "stop gap" quad core since it is essentially just two Woodcrest dies in a package and not as efficient as a true 4 core design (power consumption and heat generation will be much higher). Tigerton (Q3 2007) is probably the earliest when the Mac Pro will go Octo core across the line since this processor will be a true quad core (based on a 45nm process) and will also have a new high-speed interconnect (4 memory interconnects) to address bottlenecks in the current shared FSB implementation.

[Baburao786]

Thanks for all your Input...really got some stuff cleared out of the way...Just 2 more questions..

1. I know Mac PROs can support upto 2TB...has anyone had any success with installing the remaining 3 slots with a 750GB hard drive (3 x 750)

2. I know Leopard will be coming out in April 2007 and I can't wait that long to get my MacPRO...I know the the likely solution would be to just overwrite the system files if I want to Install Leopart, BUT what if I want to remove the "master" hard drive running Tiger on Intel and put in a new "master" hard drive and Install Leopard on there.....I am sure it can be done, but since I'll be replacing the main drive....are there any instructions I would need to follow prior to installing Leopard.

Thanks for all your inputs...I appreciate it quite a bit.

[OreoCookie]

(1) 750 GB drives will work. However, Apple offers only 500 GB drives in the AppleStore.
(2) You can easily update from one version of OS X to another and even go back to Tiger in case something goes wrong. If you are a really cautious nature, then you can install Leopard on another drive and import all your settings, applications and user accounts.

However, after 5 years of using OS X (starting with the Public Beta), I have never had an upgrade fail on me.