Re: Boot Drive: 7200 vs 10000

the velocirapter should excel as a boot drive and/or scratch disk (disk cache) based on the performance test i've seen.

the problem seems to be finding a place to put it... read the following from barefeats.com/hard103.html (you'd think i worked for this guy, but i don't, honestly...):

TRICKY INSTALL
The biggest downside of the unusual drive design is the position of the data and power connectors. They don't line up the same way as conventional SATA 3.5" drives. That means you CAN'T just mount them on the Mac Pro's factory sleds. Nor do they fit any existing external enclosure -- even if you have a SATA host adapter with external ports that can boot OS X.

In our case, we decided to connect the Velociraptors to the two spare SATA ports hiding behind the CPU inlet fan. For power, we used an external supply but it occurred to us that there are two companies offering kits to mount drives securely in the lower, empty optical drive bay of the Mac Pro. The MaxConnect Optical Bay Disk Mounting Assembly from MaxUpgrades is designed to handle two drives, drawing power from the unused Molex connector already in the bay, and routing the data cables down to the two spare SATA ports referred to above.

If you only plan to install one Velociraptor, another optical bay mounting kit available is the Pro Caddy from Trans International. I understand they are working on Pro Caddy 2 with the dual Velociraptors specifically in mind -- more on that when it's released.


Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW