MacGurus: SATA Drives

MacGurus is carrying a great performing selection of current Retail SATA hard drives. All of our manufacturers have something of a following from the Mac community, rightly so since the manufacturing processes give reliability, low noise and low operating temperatures fairly evenly with all of them. Most SATA drives from every manufacturer have a 16MB cache and all but the 10K Western Digital Raptor spin at 7200 RPM on Fluid Dynamic Bearings for low vibration/acoustical signature, long life and cool operation.

A word about OEM versus Retail Drives MacGurus' strongly recommends that our customers avoid purchasing drives marketed as OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) hard drives. We suggest that you stick always with Retail drives. Retail drives carry the retail manufacturer's warranty, 3 to 5 years, with all the contractual support that the warranty provides. OEM drives were originally manufactured for one of the many major manufacturers of computers and or servers. OEM drives do not carry a warranty from the drive manufacturer nor from the OEM buyer. Instead they are sold to resellers 'as is' and any warranty is provided by the reseller. Worse yet, these drives may have custom firmware as specified by the OEM. We frequently see customers with OEM market drives have compatibility problems in desktop usage. There is just no way to know what you are getting when you purchase OEM drives and warranty coverage is hit or miss depending on the source. MacGurus ONLY sells Retail drives.

NOTE: Now that all that is said about OEM, Seagate has gone and made things more complicated by shipping the 7200.11 Retail drives with OEM labels. We have not been able to get an answer from Seagate about why this is so, and also have been unable to buy Seagate drives with Retail labels on them. The drives are Retail, with 5 year warranty and standard firmware - every last one of them say OEM on the drive though. The Seagate 7200.11 is the king of performance, and we are going to hang in there and try and get Seagate to fix the labeling issues. The Seagate drives you receive from MacGurus will always be Retail. Please excuse us for the confusion.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives. Seagate looks to have pulled off a coup with their new 7200.11 Barracuda. This drive is so fast that it lit our hair on fire. With both reads and writes in the 100MB/sec range, a 32 MB cache and super quiet operation, it meets all our requirements for an all around high capacity drive. Now shipping in 500 GB, 700 GB and 1 TB versions, these drives are the choice for an all around drive. This is now a perfect choice for system, data or streaming media drive! Seagate drives carry a industry leading 5 year facrtory warranty! Absolute speediest RAID capabilities. You can count on this drive as your best choice for highest performance. A full 20% faster than the competition in most cases. Seagate has dropped manufacture of 3.5 inch drives smaller capacity than 500 GigaBytes. If you are looking for those smaller sizes they will have to come from a different manufacturer.

The Hitachi SATAII drives - a performance standout. Incorporating the new SATAII with a 300 MB/sec bus capability, NCQ and ATA-7 streaming feature set. A 3 year warranty and top level performance make this a first choice for all your Desktop and Server needs. This is a fine choice for all your needs, System, data, streaming media.

As of today there are some distinct performance differences between the different manufacturers drive products. The Western Digital Raptor is of course in a class of its own being the only 10k RPM SATA drive. Useful in scratch disk arrays or as a boot drive. With the 74 GB drive and the 150 GB versions you can count on the highest possible speeds available in a 3.5 inch drive. Speed rivaling SCSI even. Highly recommended to install a pair of these in your MacPro workstation in a RAID0 for scratch duties.