14 DAY TRIAL // Jonathan Seff and James Galbraith from MacWorld took a closer look into the Mac Pro's hard drives and shared their opinions with us.
The standard version of the Mac Pro comes with one 250GB SATA II hard drive. This new hard drive technology has got a potential bandwith of 3Gbps, which is two times more than the maximum bandwith supported by the SATA drives that came with the Power Mac G5.
For those that want more internal storage, Apple can replace this 250GB drive with a 500GB one, for $200 more. Also, the Mac Pro's four easy-to-access hard-drive bays can be taken advantage of, as they provide 2TB of storage space. That would be the case if one would buy four Apple 500GB hard drives ($400 a piece).
Still, if one needs even more, the authors of the article recommend Seagate Barracuda, with the capacity of 750GB for around $335. The drive installation is as easy as it gets. The only thing one has to do is to connect the drive to a metal drive carrier that is found in every empty hard-drive bays and slide it back into place. The drive connects directly to the motherboard, this procedure eliminating the use of messy data and power cables.
The article also contains some useful tips for improving the drive's performance. One way to increase drive performance is to take multiple drives and create one RAID 0 volume. This type of RAID, also referred to as a striped array, reads and writes data to and from all the drives at the same time, which can really speed things up. To see what kind of performance boost we'd get from this type of setup, we connected two 250GB drives in a RAID 0, installed OS X, and ran some of our standard tests on it. And the results were impressive, to say the least. Adding just one drive (available for $90 or less online) gave us a lot more bang for our buck than the $800 processor upgrade available from Apple. A 2.66GHz Mac Pro with a striped array was just 5 percent slower than a 3GHz Mac Pro without the striped RAID.
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