New Mac Pro Hard Drive Options

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Hi, I'm going to purchase a new Mac Pro this summer, and I'm trying to figure out exactly how to set it up. I am a graphic designer that primarily uses Photoshop, and I want really fast hard drives for my scratch disks. I was thinking of getting the standard Mac 320 gb hard drive as my main and the 500 gb hard drive as my secondary... or getting the 320 with two 36 gb Raptors. I don't know much about hard drives or hardware so I don't know what real benefits that Raptors have.
 
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Mac Pro (2) 2.8Ghz quad intel/512mb nvidia 8800GT/6GB ram/1TB HDD Macbook Pro 15" stock
i would by the componets you want but get the RAID card also. Its pricey. Get ONE hard drive, buy the others and install yourself for lot less$ www.macsales.com is where i get my stuff. I bought memory from there, $500 cheaper for 4GB more than what mac wants.
 
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Quad 2.8GHz Mac Pro, Edge iPhone
Macsales and newegg.com are great.
The Raptor drives can be nice but I saw some tests with those setup as RAID 0 for speed and they aren't much faster than a 7200RPM drive.
If you really need speed, you might want to invest in the NAS 15,000RPM drives. You wouldn't be able to use regular HDs as well though.

It will always be cheaper to upgrade on your own, no matter what you decide.
 
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MacPro quad-core 2.66gHz, Leopard, 9gb RAM, one 250gb, two 500gb and three 1tb internal SATA drives
Another Photoshop MacPro User

As others have said, buy your drives from third-parties to save money. Get the smallest drive and RAM with your MacPro and upgrade later.

I've been buying Seagate SATA II drives from www.newegg.com with good success. I recently upgraded a pair of internal 500gb RAID-1 drives for 1tb Seagates priced at $240 each. I bought 8gb of Crucial RAM from newegg and haven't had any problems with those either.

I suggest that you wait until you get your MacPro before buying drives because prices will continue to drop and sizes will increase. Why buy 1tb drives now when 2tb drives may be available in a few months? You want to maximize those four drive bays. I added four drive bays to my MacPro and currently have a total of six internal SATA 2 drives running. Four drives are mirrored sets for photoshop files. I can add two more internal hard drives if I was willing to move my optical drive into an external case.
 

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