Is There A Max Drive Capacity Limit For Mac Pro

[Rainer Wirth]

Yes, you can.

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Eric Hansen]

There is a speed limit on the bus. If your goal is speed, a 4 drive RAID connected via SAS to an ATTO R680 card will be faster than the 4 internal drives RAIDed together. the internal SATA connections are 3G whereas modern drives are now 6G. Software RAIDs (using the internal bays) have a bit of processor overhead too.

if you’re going to RAID, make sure you use drives designed for that. don’t use “green” drives or those that spin down.

you can put drives in the optical bays too, for 6 drives internally.

if you’re only going to use all these drives occasionally, i would recommend an external box that you can shut off. I have all the bays in my Mac Pro filled and it’s amazing how much power this thing sucks at idle. Surfing the internet uses like 300 watts, whereas my MacBook Pro is like 20w. just another thing to keep in mind.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Peter Tours]

Hey Eric thank you so much for your reply. I was remiss in not describing my rig – it’s a 2010 MacPro 12 core with an Apple Raid Card and 1tb drives in each of the 4 bays. Bay 1 is the system drive, bays 2-4 are a Raid 0. So the bigger drives would replace bays 2-4 for more capacity. I am reasonably satisfied with the 250mbs throughput I get for my DVCPRO HD material. It’s just that 3tb is getting to be too cramped nowadaze. I would use WD Caviar Black or similar 7200rpm drive. I was concerned over whether the jump from 3 to 6gb/s and 32 to 64mb cache would be tolerated.

Peter Tours
TnT Video Services, Inc.
Fort Lauderdale, FL

TRI EA5 1974-1977
Convergence ECS1B 1977-1979
Sony BVE 500 1979 – 1984
Datatron Vanguard 1984 – 1993
GVG VPE141 1993 – 1998
Media 100 1995 – 2006
Final Cut Pro 2005 to not too much longer
Adobe Creative Cloud

[Eric Hansen]

Western Digital has changed their line up a bit. they no longer recommend the Black (or what they’re now calling the Black) for RAIDs. their new desktop RAID hard drive is the Red. they also have an enterprise version called the RE. but my go-to is Hitachi Ultrastar.

you’ll also get a massive performance increase if you switch your boot drive to an SSD.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Jon Schilling]

Western Digital Ultrastar Eric, Hitachi no longer makes hard drives.

Jonathan Schilling
Vertical Sales Manager
Proavio Storage by Enhance Technology Inc.
12221 Florence Ave.
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
Dir: 562-777-3498
Main: 562-777-3488 X106
Fax: 562-777-3499
Email: jon@proavio.com

[Eric Hansen]

I don’t see “Ultrastar” on WD’s site. is the RE the same?

all i see are HGST, subtitle “a Western Digital company”. are they sticking with the HGST name or switching to WD eventually? kinda confusing.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Peter Tours]

Kinda pricey then https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145621

I don’t see an RPM for the WD Red Drives…got burned by Green, now suspicious.

I back up with an OCD passion so I think the less expensive drives might still be ok for me.

Back in the Media 100 daze I used to have 10K rpm SCSI drives…ironic ain’t it?

Peter Tours
TnT Video Services, Inc.
Fort Lauderdale, FL

TRI EA5 1974-1977
Convergence ECS1B 1977-1979
Sony BVE 500 1979 – 1984
Datatron Vanguard 1984 – 1993
GVG VPE141 1993 – 1998
Media 100 1995 – 2006
Final Cut Pro 2005 to not too much longer
Adobe Creative Cloud

[Eric Hansen]

the Reds will be 7200.

use cheap hard drives for archive, not for RAIDs

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Jon Schilling]

Eric,

You are correct.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital that sells hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external …

https://www.hgst.com To me it kind of looks like it’s HGST by WD, which IS confusing.

Thanks for correcting me, you’ll see Ultrastar drives there.

Jonathan Schilling
Vertical Sales Manager
Proavio Storage by Enhance Technology Inc.
12221 Florence Ave.
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
Dir: 562-777-3498
Main: 562-777-3488 X106
Fax: 562-777-3499
Email: jon@proavio.com

[Ricardo Reyes]

The WD Red drives are 5400RPM drives. Here’s some benchmarks comparing both the WD RE and WD Red drives we just conducted last week.

4x Drives RAID 5 – Using Macbook PRO connected to the Areca ARC-8050 Thunderbolt Unit.

WD RE (WD4001FYYG)
Read – 375MB/s
Write – 530MB/s

WD Red (WD30EFRX)
Read – 211MB/s
Write – 489MB/s

No surprise, the 7200RPM WD RE drives are much faster.

And, if your wondering how the WD RE compares with the Hitachi Ultrastar, here’s the benchmark numbers we got.

Hitachi Ultrastar
Read – 342MB/s
Write – 525MB/s

The performance of the WD RE and Hitachi Ultrastar are very similar, Again no surprise since they do share the same overall design and both use the 5x 800GB platters. It comes down to user preference, mine is the WD RE.

Ricardo Reyes
Areca Technologies – US Channel
Ricardo@ArecaUS.com
http://www.Areca.com.tw

***** RAID is not a substitute for proper and regular backups *****