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BARE FEATS - real world Mac speed tests

REVIEW:
Trans International Pro Drive

Originally posted October 7th, 2008, by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

"A UNIQUE MAC PRO STORAGE SOLUTION"
TransIntl.com has created a unique "sled" for the Mac Pro factory drive bays called the Pro Drive. Hold on to your hat. It houses two notebook drives in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration. You set the RAID mode with a simple, external dip switch. We installed dual Hitachi 7K320 Travelstars in the test unit.


We then ran our QuickBench 4 suite of tests to see how the Pro Drive in RAID 0 mode stacked up against the fast Western Digital WD6400AAKS 7200rpm 640GB 3.5" SATA drive and the fast, new Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000rpm 300GB 2.5" SATA drive:


ANALYSIS
The Pro Drive is an intriguing concept. If you think of the Pro Drive as a single drive, it stacks up well against the fastest "regular" SATA drives. Plus it offers the added "ruggedness" of a notebook drive. Huh? I'm referring to the fact that a notebook drive we used (Hitachi 7K320 Travelstar) can handle 400 Gs of shock during operation while a conventional 3.5" drive such as the WD6400AAKS can handle only 30 Gs and the Velociraptor can handle only 65 Gs.

And based on the sustained speeds we got with our test Pro Drive (150MB/s), we're confident that four striped Pro Drives could achieve 600MB/s. That's almost as fast as we got from four 15K.6 Seagate Cheetah SAS drives in a recent test session -- but at a fraction of the cost ($1780 versus $4500 including SAS host adapter).

Installation of the dual notebook drives is a snap and the vent holes insure adequate air circulation around the dual notebook drives.

Though I am obsessing on using it in RAID 0 mode, you may chose to use it in RAID 1 mode so you have a "real time backup" or mirror of your critical files.

VELOCIRAPTORS DON'T FIT
I only wish I could put two Velociraptors in the ProDrive frame but, because those drives are 15mm thick, they won't fit. But Trans International is working on Pro Caddy 2 which will place two "Backplane Ready" Velociraptors in the lower optical bay of the Mac Pro.

SSDs DO FIT
Since Solid State Drives come in 2.5" form factor (and are 9.5mm thick), they will work in the Pro Drive. How about two Intel X25-Ms to form a 160GB boot drive with 300MB/s READ speed and 150MB/s WRITE speed? Stay tuned for a full report on this scenario.


Apple Online Store

WHERE TO BUY THE PRO DRIVE
Order the Pro Drive directly from Trans International (TransIntl.com) with or without drives pre-installed.

Check out their other Mac Pro storage products like....

  1. Pro Caddy
  2. Pro Sled
  3. SwiftData 200 and 200R
  4. bare SATA Hard Drives
  5. MiniG SATA Enclosures

WHERE TO BUY 7200rpm NOTEBOOK (2.5") SATA DRIVES

  1. Trans International
  2. Other World Computing

WHERE TO BUY A MAC PRO
When ordering products from Apple Store USA, please click THIS TEXT LINK or any Apple display ad as your "portal" to the online store. In so doing, you help to support Bare Feats.

Also check with Small Dog Electronics and Power Max. (Power Max takes trade-ins.)

And visit the site of our newest advertiser, Silverado Systems, who offers the Velociraptor as a CTO option on their custom built Mac Pros.

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© 2008 Rob Art Morgan
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
Email , the webmaster