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Recommended hard drives for Mac Pro
Be sure to see Optimizing Photoshop for insights on high-performance systems. Hard drives and solid state drives are improving rapidly.
Don’t forget that a solid state drive is an option, especially for a boot drive. See Solid State Drives.
Choose your vendor carefully
Especially for hard drives, buy only from a vendor that accepts exchanges, in case you encounter an issue with a brand or model of hard drive.
I once had to “eat” a 15% restocking fee, which I negotiated down to 10% by ordering replacement drives of another brand. Hard drives are such low margin items that there usually is a restocking fee from cut-rate vendors. It’s not worth saving a few bucks given the possible hassles involved.
Replacement guarantee
Our recommended vendor and site sponsor OWC includes a 90 day bad-drive replacement guarantee, which is an especially Big Deal if a hard drive is to be part of a RAID. Always purchase an extra drive if you’re making a RAID, so that you can swap out a bad drive of matching model/capacity.
Recommended hard drives PERMALINK
The hard drives below are recommended for use in the Mac Pro, based on research while preparing Optimizing Photoshop and subsequent testing. They’ll also work great on any system with an external SATA enclosure, such as a MacBook Pro with an eSATA Express Card. As a result of Seagate drive failures, Seagate models are no longer included in this list.
- Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 Buy
- I switched to these drives for my main Mac Pro in October 2009. Awesomely fast, and my top pick as of October 2009. See the review.
- Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000.E “Saturn” Buy
- Enterprise model. utstanding performance, quiet operation, every bit as good as the Western Digital RE-3 and even a little faster in some cases. My drive of choice prior to the 2TB model above. Highly recommended! See review.
- Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS-01A6B0 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Buy
- Enterprise model. Excellent Mac pro performance, as documented in the Mac Pro test results with Photoshop. Performance is also excellent in the Mac Pro’s internal drive bays. See review.
- Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 7K1000.B 'Saturn' Buy
- An excellent choice for MacBook Pro users, or anyone on a budget. See review.
See more choices at OWC. For performance, always go with the largest drives, even if you don’t need the space.
Different-brand eSATA (external SATA) cards and/or drive firmware versions and/or different versions of the Mac Pro can all contribute to varying performance. Results might also be slightly different using the Mac Pro’s internal ports as compared with an eSATA setup.
Try other brands/models at your discretion, but assume nothing: always test your setup with DiskTester to verify performance and reliability (see Setting up Your Mac).
Be sure to read Why you need more space than you need: for highest performance get about double the storage you plan on occupying with data.
Hard drive choice is especially important with striped RAID; a single drive might perform well on its own, but not as well in a RAID. Reliability is also worth considering, especially when moving to 3/4/5/6 drive striped RAID.
Do not mix and match different brand or models of hard drives for RAID; performance or other glitches can occur.
Other hard drives
Some of the following drives can be good choices as well, and this list is not exclusive of other possibilities. Comments below apply to personal experience with eight Seagate 1TB ES.2 enterprise drives in total, most used for over a year on a daily basis. These drives have been retired to backup duty as of October 2009.
- SEAGATE Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS 1TB SATA 7200 RPM 32MB
- I used six of these drives inside my Mac Pro for about a year. These drives are not necessarily the fastest, but worked flawlessly for me, and they work great in a RAID or singly. For a very nice writeup on the advantages of “enterprise grade” hard drives, see Seagate’s Barracuda ES Hard Drive.
- SEAGATE Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB SATA 7200 RPM 32MB
- This is the “AS” non-enterprise version of the Seagate ES.2. They seem to perform about as well as the “NS” version as single drives in a 2-drive striped RAID. The 1.5TB version of this drive should be preferred, for its significantly higher performance.
- SEAGATE Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB SATA II 7200 RPM 32MB
- These are the new 1.5TB models of the 1TB 7200.11. I had trouble with these drives until I updated my Sonnet E4P SATA card to version 2.1.4 of the firmware, at which point the drives began working reliably and very fast, even faster than the Seagate ES.2 drives above, though not as fast as the Western Digital RE3 in a Mac Pro.
- SAMSUNG 1TB Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ
- I had poor results with the Samsung 1TB drives: see April 7, 2008 blog entry. Possibly the latest firmware on my Sonnet E4P SATA card might now make them work better, but the issues existed on the Mac Pro internal SATA ports as well. The 2nd-generation (8-core) Mac Pros might fare differently.
Caution: Seagate 3.5" desktop hard drives
Although I’ve experienced no problems with the Seagate drives I’ve used, serious problems were brewing in the Seagate world as of December 2008 that resulted in total data loss. This is no longer an issue in 2009.
