WD Raptor - Replace Orginal G5 HD?

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Hey

as the title states, i want to replace the 160gig standard drive with a Western Digital Raptor 36gig drive. i know its a drop in size but i am soon to be sorting out 1TB of external storage. what i would like to know is:

First off, can it be done? i assume it is just a case of swapping the 2 drives and installing OSX on the new 1?

Secondly, will i benefit from the increased speed of the Raptor drive, as its one of the only SATA drives that have an increased spin speed of 10,000 RPM (at least it used to be)

the raptor is in my old windows based machine and as thats now unused and i certainly dont need 160gig of space with 1TB of external space i want to bung the raptor in, although if i wont make use of the speed of the drive then i may reconsider.

Any advise would be appreciated

Fraser
 
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lil

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Not a massive increase in data transfer rates. It will be faster but the biggest benefits come from striped RAIDs.

I run a striped RAID on my G4 and it is very fast, all Adobe apps launch in a few seconds. I would suggest looking into these options. The WD Raptor drives are excellent though and I swear by WD for reliability.

Vicky
 
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as much as i know about computers, my knowledge on RAID setups is awful. certainly speed is something that im after (ex overclocker of amd's :D) and im a student doing media so running FCP as fast as it can is very usful. is a RAID setup something i can afford? as i mentioned i was looking at getting a 1TB external setup (1 500gb hdd for music and general stuff to share with my windows laptop and the other 500gb hdd for my mac, mainly editing) is this a wise move? apologies if this has moved too far from the subject, let me know and i will start a new thred.

thanks for the replys, i may bung the raptor in my mac just to see if there is much benefit

Regards

Fraser
 
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Just for the sake of asking lil, why are you running striped RAIDs? Is it just for the space? All of mine are mirrored for data backup, so that is why I am curious. Also, are you using OSX Disc Utility to build them or another App? Any special cards? Internal or external? FW or USB2? I don't find many folks who know what RAID is, much less actually have one (or 3 in my case) set up.
 
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lil

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I'm running two 'standard' WD Caviar 160GB drives, ATA/133 spec through a Sonnet Tempo ATA133 RAID card. I'm using striped RAID for the extra speed boost, well massive speed boost it gives. I could potentially use mirroring but I have chosen speed over backup, and I do a weekly backup anyway. It's an internal PCI card which can also operate as a standard ATA133 card.

For those unaware:

RAID 0 is Striped RAID, essentially two drives working in tandem. The Mac says, I want some info, it goes to the RAID controller card and it tells the two drives to get certain parts of the file, the drives get the info and pass it back to the controller, it stitches it together and sends it down to the Mac. Most drives cannot sustain a transfer of 66MB/s let alone get up to 100MB/s or 133MB/s (ATA100/133) nor SATA150/300. Two drives working together does not double the speed but it gets close. www.xlr8yourmac.com has a number of good articles. On a RAID 0 (Striped RAID)—if one drive fails, data is lost on both hard drives.

RAID 1 or Mirroring is where you are running two drives off the RAID controller that mirror each other, there is no speed benefit but the peace of mind that should one drive fail, you can remove it, plonk in a new drive and it will automatically copy over, giving you some backup security.

I'm not aware of any RAID cards for Firewire or USB2. The only ones I know are PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards.

In terms of cost:

2 x 160GB WD Drives = £100
RAID Controller card (PCI, you will need a PCI-Express card since yours is a new PowerMac G5 Dual Core) = £70.

£170 all told, lots of space and very fast too.

Not too bad really.


Vicky
 
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Hey

thanks for that quick explanation, it turns out i did know the basics of that. my only issue is that i really want a LOT of space, hence the ideas of 1TB and im pretty sure this needs to be external as i need to access data on 1 drive from a windows based laptop and i may also require to transport the drives every so ofton.

anyone know of a way to set this sort of thing up with external drives?

also is there a huge problem with loosing data, while the idea of backing up everything sounds great to me, it would also mean (with my setup idea) that i loose 500gig of space in mirroring it or i run the risk of loosing the lot if somthing goes down.

thanks agin for your help, very much appreciated.


Fraser
 

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