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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Mac Desktops > Would I get better performance from external HD or SATA?

Would I get better performance from external HD or SATA?
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velvetlampshade
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May 3, 2005, 04:43 PM
 
Would I get better performance if I filled the extra hard drive bay in my G5 or if I used a firewire 800 external HD. I assume the performance would be better with SATA but I am not for sure. Do you have any recommendations for SATA drives for my G5?

Justin
     
deboerjo
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May 3, 2005, 05:06 PM
 
SATA

Seagate > Hitachi > everybody else
     
Kristoff
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May 3, 2005, 05:15 PM
 
WD Raptor > Seagate > Everybody Else
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especially ones with political tripe in them.
     
velvetlampshade  (op)
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May 3, 2005, 05:54 PM
 
Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital???

I have been looking around storage review and can't make any conclusions. What Drive came in my new dual 2.0 G5 (160gig)? I am looking for great performance without alot of noise. I will probably replace the 160 gig drive and install a second both being 250+ gig... Any thoughts???

Justin
     
Kristoff
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May 3, 2005, 06:14 PM
 
Maxtor Diamond Max is what you have (I have the same machine)

The WD Raptor is the fastest SATA drive out there, and has a 5 year warranty, but is expensive and only comes in an 80 GB size. It is very fast, and very quiet. Depends on how fast you want.
signatures are a waste of bandwidth
especially ones with political tripe in them.
     
majesticmac
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Dec 19, 2005, 01:19 PM
 
Seagate or Hitachi drives for a Raid to edit FCP video

I am looking at the 400g from both lines. FCP folks seem to like Hitachi but Seagate just came out with the Seagate Barracuda7200.9 drives. Some on-line Raid manufactures are pushing the Seagates. I was wondering if video has different demands from the raid that they are overlooking. The hitachi are of course more expensive.
     
mduell
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Dec 20, 2005, 03:22 AM
 
SATA is faster than FW800 any day of the week; in addition to the lower throughput ceiling and higher latency of FW800, you will also lose some performance going through the bridge chip from the drive's native interface (ATA or SATA) to Firewire.

The latest big Seagate drives won't work in PowerMacs (unless you use another computer to disable something on them). Unless your performance really really depends on seek time, the Raptors are a lot of money for very little space; you can get the same throughput from a 7200RPM drive that has 4 times the capacity for the same price.

As for picking a drive, how much space do you need and how much money are you willing to spend? 250-320GB is the best point now in terms of capacity/price at $0.35/GB to $0.45/GB. Anything lower isn't much cheaper (maybe $20-40 less); 400 and 500GB are available for reasonable prices ($200 and $350, respectively).
     
CIA
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Dec 25, 2005, 01:43 AM
 
I have 2x74GB Raptors internal in my quad, striped into a RAID0+1 (they mirror to a slower external firewire 160GB drive) Performance is awesome to say the least. They are fast, and quiet. Although they do have a loud seek noise when being accessed. During long copies tho, like a DVD sized file or something, when the heads aren't thrasing about, it's damn quiet.
Yeah, they were pricey, but I wanted the best possible performance out of my new quad.
I now need to always keep an eye on my boot RAID available space tho. RAID0 performance drops off a lot as the disks fill up. (well, same goes for single drive performance also I guess). I have 140ish GB available from the RAID, and I try to keep atleast 70GB free on it at all times. That way all the important data is on the outter rim of the drives, and can be read or written faster.
I'm still tinkering with the best setup for me. My next experiment is to partition my RAID, so that system and critical apps make up the outter rim partition, and real low importance/low disk need files make up the inner partition. Like files that don't require a lot of disk access once they are opened... text documents, PDF's, etc etc... I'm using Mac OSX disk utility to manage the raid.
Work: 2008 8x3.2 MacPro, 8800GT, 16GB ram, zillions of HDs. (video editing)
Home: 2008 24" 2.8 iMac, 2TB Int, 4GB ram.
Road: 2009 13" 2.26 Macbook Pro, 8GB ram & 640GB WD blue internal
Retired to BOINC only: My trusty never-gonna-die 12" iBook G4 1.25
     
mduell
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Dec 25, 2005, 03:36 AM
 
Originally Posted by CIA
I have 2x74GB Raptors internal in my quad, striped into a RAID0+1 (they mirror to a slower external firewire 160GB drive) Performance is awesome to say the least.
How does that not kill your performance? The RAID0 of the Raptors would be ripping fast, but when you mirror that array with the 160 the new array's speed should be about as fast as the 160 (a write would have to finish on the Raptor array and the 160 before another could be started).

*confused in Santa Barbara*
     
CIA
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Dec 25, 2005, 09:49 AM
 
Yeah, well, it's more of a hacked RAID0+1 then a true one. It's really a RAIDO with scheduled backup. Every morning at 4am Carbon Copy Cloner clones the drive to the 160. So yeah, if a drive fails in the middle of the day I'm out that days work. But most of the time I've had hints a drive is gonna fail and had time to swap it out before disaster strikes. I know I still could have a catastrophic failure, but I bank that the odds of it happening are low enough I'm OK with the setup listed above.
Merry X-Mas
Work: 2008 8x3.2 MacPro, 8800GT, 16GB ram, zillions of HDs. (video editing)
Home: 2008 24" 2.8 iMac, 2TB Int, 4GB ram.
Road: 2009 13" 2.26 Macbook Pro, 8GB ram & 640GB WD blue internal
Retired to BOINC only: My trusty never-gonna-die 12" iBook G4 1.25
     
   
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