For those with MacPros, will a 10K Velociraptor as a boot and scratch disk speed things up significantly up or am I better off to raid 2 7200 drives?

I don't know but I have two 10k's for boot and scatch and two 7200 1T's for internal data and back-up and a 1T external for bkup.

Steve

On boot: The new WD 10K Velociraptor Sata2 (about $300 each) single or dual drive boot time was essentially the same as the new dual platter WD 640G 7K Caviar (less than $100 each) in a test at Barefeats: http://www.barefeats.com/hard103.html. Personally, I don't think you'll gain a lot by going with the 10K except a lighter wallet due to ti being about 6x the cost per gig. Also keep in mind it is a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" form factor sled, and a 3.5" drive spinning at 7200 RPM has almost identical outer edge rotational speed as the 2.5" drive spinning at 10K... Finally, the 10K VR is NOT standard SATA connector location, so is not compatible with the Mac slide in trays unless you purchase an adapter sled for another $50: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cf...&product_id=180

On CS Scratch: Here you will likely see a slight performance boost, probably on the order of 10% or so over the 7K drive. However, I software striped (RAID 0) a pair of the WD 640's through OSX and gained about a 40% speed boost on scratch performance with CS, so probably a better place to spend your money. And of course you'll have 1.2TB of fast (but less reliable) storage after doing that. FWIW I partitioned off a thin stripe dedicated to scratch, and use the rest for working image storage since the I/O is about 2x as fast as a single drive. HOWEVERBUT, if you striped a pair of the 10K VR's it would probably smoke

Regardless, for maximum performance you do NOT want your OS page and CS scratch partitions on the same physical drives or RAID sets as they'll bog down competing for I/O time...

(Discussed this and some other MacPro performance tips in a bit more detail on this thread if you're interested: http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2440)

Cheers,

There is a backplane-ready version of the VelociRaptor that fits the MacPro :
http://westerndigital.com/en/products/Prod...asp?DriveID=495

Hi Billy: Yes, it's been announced for over a month, but unfortunately I have not seen it listed as available anywhere like OWC or Newegg. Would you happen to know where it might be in stock?

It's in stock at Provanatage in 20-packs
http://www.provantage.com/western-digital-...pk~7WND900Y.htm

Touche! But even at their bulk price, it breaks down to over $315 per drive...

Thanks for the good advice guys, ended up with a 640 WD as a boot drive, without any testing it seems a lot faster for start-up. Happy to save the extra money too. Hard drives are a relative bargain these days in Canada, cheaper than US. Peter

Taking advantage of a pre-amptive boot drive replacement, I have just replaced my initial Apple 500GB boot drive with a Velociraptor, application launch is significantly faster (nearly twice faster for PS).

The initial drive remains as 2 mins boot disk hotswap option in case of crash.

Cheers,
Bernard

Why can't one use a 32-Gig Solid State drive for this? This is the best performance improvement per buck one can get for one's computer!

Michael

Because the current state of gen-2 SSD drives do not really perform any better than the best SATA2 drives do at present; many have significantly slower write times too...

Another reason is that the current chipset of the MacPro (at least the first gen of Intel Mac Pro like mine) appears not to be optimized for SSDs. I tried using a Mtron 6000 with my Macpro as PS scratch disk, and it was significantly slower than my older Raptor 150GB.

As far as pure SSD performance goes, the latest Intel SSDs appear to be blowing any HD else out of the water both in reads and writes, but the problem with the chipset might still remain. Not too sure. I have lost 300+ US$ once already, if somebody else wants to try the new Intels on the Macpro I'd love to hear about the results.

Cheers,
Bernard