THE COMPETITORS
We tried to think of fast SATA drives you might consider for a boot drive other than the Velociraptor. Some that came to mind include the impressive Samsung Spinpoint F1, the WD Caviar Blue (640GB -- more capacity that two Velociraptors), and the previous WD 10K SATA drive, the Raptor 10K 150GB. Plus, we figured a power user may want dual Velociraptors (RAID 0) to squeeze out even more speed and increase the boot drive total capacity to 600GB. So we included results for "striped" dual drive sets.
GRAPH LEGEND
Dual Drive = Striped (RAID 0) Set
Velociraptor = WD Velociraptor SATA drive (10K RPM, 300GB, 16MB cache, 3Gb/s, model WD3000GLFS)
Spinpoint = Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA drive (7K RPM, 1000GB, 32MB cache, 3Gb/s, model HD103UJ)
Raptor = WD Raptor SATA drive (10K RPM, 150GB, 16MB cache, 1.5Gb/s, model WD1500ADFD)
WD6400 = WD Caviar Blue (7K RPM, 640GB, 16MB cache, 3Gb/s, model WD6400AAKS)
CONCLUSION
The WD 10K 300GB Velociraptor 3Gb/s SATA drive is impressive in its handling of large sequential data transfers as well as small random transfers. We're so impressed, we plan to use a dual drive RAID 0 pair as our Mac Pro's permanent boot volume.
DREAM DRIVE CONFIG
In my mind, the perfect setup for a power user with a Mac Pro is to have dual Velociraptors for booting and with four very fast, large capacity drives in the factory sleds for data capture and storage. We'll talk more about the ultimate four data drives in a future article but our focus in this article is on the Velociraptor as a boot drive.
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.
Since we posted this page, we were received samples of the MaxConnect WD Velociraptor Heatsink/Sled from MaxUpgrades which enables you to mount the Velociraptors in the Mac Pro's factory bays. See our article featuring this solution.
