Hey Guys,

Just after some opinions on 500Gb hard drives for the Mac Pro. I've stumbled across some quite negative sounding reports on various SATA II drives on a couple of mac-centric websites. So just a few questions:

What 3rd party hard drives are you guys running, and how do you find them?

Is it worth paying the extra for NCQ for video editing and light vfx work? or is a regular 16Mb SATA II drive fine?

Cheers,

Mark

Hi,

I use 4 Western Digital RAID Edition hard drives in RAID setup, connected via e-SATA card to my G5. They work perfect. Very fast, too.

You're going to laugh at me. It's OK.

Log onto the Apple Store. Click on 500 gig hard drive. Hit ORDER. Go back to work. Time investment - 2 minutes.

Two days later the drive arrives at my door. Find another 2 minutes to slide it into the chassis. Go back to work.

Total time investment 4-5 minutes.

Yes, absolutely - I WILL totally and unabashedly pay MORE than you will.

But it will work the first time, every time. If it does not, I'll go the the Apple store and they'll replace it, no questions asked.

I'll gladly PAY Apple to do that kind of research. They win and I win.

Just another way of looking at it. FWIW.

Haha, not quite laughing Bill - more bemusedly raising one eyebrow.

I'm a miserly student so I'm not giving Apple a cent for any extra components. They want AUD$1,999 for 4Gb of RAM... I've already ordered 4Gb from OWC and they charged me just AUD$420 including the shipping and insurance - that's an 80% saving!!!

I see your point about reliability and coverage, but I have a lot more time on my hands than money, so it works for me - the savings I'm making on buying my components elsewhere is allowing me to pay for both FCS2 and Adobe CS3 Production Premium and still come out on top.

...though it helps that student discounts allow me to get those two program packages for AUD$1,470 as opposed to AUD$4,723 retail!

I'm using a Maxtor "6H500F0" 500gb SATA-II drive in my MacPro without a problem. It's my main capture/scratch disc for FCP. It has NCQ, but I don't really have anything to compare it to, so I can't tell if it was worth it or not.

The drive would have been a great deal if I had gotten the rebate that went with it... but apparently I filled something out wrong, so it was only a decent deal.