Replacing 2 Year Old Internal Hard Drive ? Options

[Milca]

I have Power MAC Dual G5 2,7 GHz which has a Western Digital caviar ( WDC - WD2500JD ) - stock drive - 250GB.
I’m adding one more internal HD which is going to be seagate Barracuda 400 or 500 GB - SATA - which I’m planning to use as an audio drive.
It’s important to note that since I’ve made some big mistakes as far as handling my apps I’m doing “ erase and install” on my boot drive Caviar and starting from the scratch - Basically doing whole new setup with my music apps,sample libraries and back up.
So my first question is whether would be wise( besides adding seagate to second slot) also to replace my two year old caviar with a new and stronger drive (since I’m doing the whole new set up ) or it is just fine to leave the caviar in there and use it probably only for my music and other application and as a boot drive.

Reason I’m asking is that I’ve read in couple of posts that I can get better performance of my boot drive with bigger drives or faster ones like raptor
Basically since I’m installing all my apps right from the start - I might as well do it on better and faster drive.
On the other I don’t want to waste money for two new internal HD if Caviar will work just fine?

I would appreciate any feedback
Thanks for your time
Milan

[Jim Hoyland]

Recent studies have shown that neither age or volume of use have very much to do with hard-disk failure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6376021.stm

From what I've read, if a disk is going to fail, its going to fail, so if your 2 year old Caviar is performing okay, I'd leave well enough alone.

A nice little application that monitors the performance of your hard-disks and (hopefully) warns you in advance of failure) is Julian Mayer's Smart Reporter:

http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer/

This post has been edited by Jim Hoyland: Wed 13 Jun 2007, 08:54

[Milca]

Thanks a lot for your advice

[CanadaRAM]

Reason I’m asking is that I’ve read in couple of posts that I can get better performance of my boot drive with bigger drives or faster ones like raptor
Basically since I’m installing all my apps right from the start - I might as well do it on better and faster drive.
On the other I don’t want to waste money for two new internal HD if Caviar will work just fine?

There isn't anything particularly wrong with the Caviar, it's a good standard drive. Of course, like any drive it will fail. When, nobody knows.

Larger drives, particularly the new ones with perpendicular recording, are faster because they have greater areal density -- that is, more data passes under the heads with each revolution of the platter. Premium new drives come with 16 Mb of cache memory, as opposed to 8 or even 2 Mb on standard drives.

Also, because the inner tracks of a drive are slower than the outer tracks (because the track length -- the perimeter -- is much shorter at a small diameter) a small capacity drive will get slower sooner, because as you add 100 Gb of data to a 120 Gb drive, you push it to the innermost tracks, where a 500 Gb drive is still only 20% of the way in. The performance penalty of an inner track can be substantial, often only half the throughput of the outer tracks.

The Raptor drives are not large, they top out at 150 Gb. They run at 10,000 RPM instead of 7,200, which is an advantage. They are hot, noisy and expensive, which are all factors to consider. Also though, they are a smaller platter diameter than a standard 3.5" drive, so they have the shorter perimeter problem, and due to their small size, will hit performance penalties of inner tracks much earlier.

For audio the most important thing is to get your audio files onto a separate drive than your System and applications. Then the next is to ensure that your working files are as close to the outside tracks of the drive as possible. Third is to have the largest drive you can afford, preferably with perpendicular recording. Last is to consider whether you want to go into dedicated Raptor drives. My bias is that RAID systems do not offer an advantage over separate drives with the tasks divided onto different drives.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM

This post has been edited by CanadaRAM: Sat 14 Jul 2007, 19:02