MacPro ATA serial Drives

Well-I've been out of the loop in the ATA world for MAcs so I thought I would post this question to Mac users across the land:

Just put a Mac Pro system together for someone and its down to the hard drives. He doesnt want to go eSata - wants to stick with serial ATA 500 gig drives.

I sort of figured it was down to the WD Caviar® SE16 or the HITACHI Deskstar P7K500.

Any thoughts or confirmations from ATA users would be most appreciated.

Cheers,

allan leung

Would go the WD route as still think of Hitachi's as 'Deathstars' from the IBM days lol.

lol. thats funny. When I called my local Apple store all they had were Hitachis...

You don't need to buy it from Apple, any computer hardware supplier will have a range of hard drives for you to choose from. They're extremely simple to install on the Mac Pro

I know. I wouldnt ever buy from APPLE. I'm just not sure WHAT to buy. I dont trust hard drives.

I think most people will tell you Western Digital and Seagate are the more reliable brands. Personally I exclusively buy Seagate drives and I've had no reason to regret that decision so far.

Is there a 500 gig Seagate you can recommend for the Mac Pro?

Personally, if I had that brief I'd go for a Barracuda ST3500320NS

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=barracuda-es-2-sata-3-0-gb/s-500-gb-hard-drive-st3500320ns&vgnextoid=8c045cf536b43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=b655f141e7f43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&reqPage=Model

Some say to make sure you remove the jumper on the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 that limits xfer rates to 1.5 mb/s vs. 3. What do you think of doing that with a MAC in mind?

The jumper is apparently to select between 1.5GB/sec and 3GB/sec. As the Mac Pro supports 3GB/sec it's best to remove the jumper to allow the drive to be accessed at the full speed available.

actually MAc MAll says that drive wont work on a Mac.

I have it's big brother the ST31000340NS in my Mac Pro and it's working very nicely.

They are standard SATA hard drives, there's no particular PC only compatibility that I'm aware of

Where did you see that it wouldn't work?

It's on their site. Says PC only. I called their tech support and they confirmed. Who knows they could be wrong. I grabbed 3 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11's. I hope they dont overheat.