SATA Hard Drive Brand Suggestions/Help

[Jeff Carpenter]

I don’t know too much about brands…I tend to usually buy Western Digital or Maxtor drives and I’ve always been happy with them.

When I bought a SATA drive a few months ago the 2 largest sizes were 300 and 400 GB. I found that the 400 GB drives all had 8 MB caches and the 300 GB had a 16 MB cache. I don’t know how big a deal that is, really, but I decided to go with the 300 GB because of it.

I don’t know if that’s still the case today or not, but it’s worth looking up. Cache size is something they never tell you in the ads, you need to go to the manufacturer’s web site to find out.

Oh, and use the instructions on drive replacement in the Powermac manual. (The info is also available on Apple.com) Everything in the G5 case is designed to be easy to work with but that usually means it’s different than any other computer you’ve messed with. Once you have pictures of how to do it in front of you it goes a LOT faster then if you just try to figure it out on your own.

[Tony! Hulette]

[VideoManSF] “I am looking to add a second drive to my G5 dual 2.7Ghz for reference files, live type, dvdsp, and soundtrack pro files (the 40GB install files and extras). I am wondering if one brand or type of drive is better than another for a G5. I mainly deal with SCSI, and FC Raids and I have never added a SATA before. I am looking for 200-500GB in 7,200 – 10,000 with 8-16MB cache. I have used IBM drives in the past but they are now Hitachi and I don’t know…”

https://barefeats.com/hard48.html

CONCLUSIONS
The Maxtor MaXLine III 300GB is the overall fastest single 7200RPM Serial ATA drive you can buy. It was fastest in 5 out of 7 tests. The DiamondMax 10 sibling of the MaXLine III is just as fast, but only comes with a shorter warranty (3 years vs 5 years). If I had to pick one 7200rpm drive for my G5 Power Mac, the MaXLine III would be it.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB came scored first in the two ZoneBench READ tests and came in second on the Finder Duplicate test. It also had one other distinct advantage over the MaXLine. At the 270MB mark (or 90% of its capacity), the Maxtor MaXLine was running at 40MB/s. At that same 270GB mark, the Seagate was running at over 50MB/s.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 came in second on the Photoshop Rotate test and beat the MaXLine in the ZoneBench test at the 270GB mark, but was third or fourth in the other tests. Its main strength is its half terabyte capacity. Though it has a 16MB internal cache (just like the MaXLine III), that didn’t seem to help it keep up with the MaXLine III, the only other drive with 16MB buffer.

The Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB SATA II is a not a slow drive. It’s just not as fast as the others tested.

Though the Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM drive was included in the graphs, it’s a little unfair. It has much less storage than the others (74GB) and runs at a much higher RPM (10,000). It’s really a different “animal.” Yet readers have indicated that it is on their shopping list for a G5 boot drive. If you don’t feel restricted by the limited capacity, it’s a really fast drive… especially if you have it connected to the Firmtek PCI-X host adapter. But it’s a noisy devil.

Tony!

[A.lee]

I have two of the Maxtor 300’s. So far, great!

[Dominic]

I’m using the Hitachi 400GB SATA drive and it’s fine. I regularly edit HDV footage in Motion, which demands a very good bus speed, and have no probs.