Apple's Mac Pro: A Discussion of Specifications
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 9, 2006 3:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Drive Options
One of the biggest complaints about the PowerMac G5s was that the chassis, despite being absolutely massive, only featured two 3.5" hard drive bays and no room for extra optical devices. The new Mac Pro chassis, although identical from the outside, has been totally revamped on the inside to accommodate a total of four 3.5" SATA hard drives and up to two optical drives.
Apple allows you to order your system with as few or as many of these bays populated as possible, but if you look closely at the pricing, you may want to avoid letting Apple upgrade your hard drive for you. Below we compared the price of Apple's drive upgrades to the best prices we were able to find for various 500GB drives on our Real Time Price Engine:
| Drive Upgrade | Price |
Apple Store: 500GB Upgrade |
$200 |
Apple Store: Extra 500GB |
$400 |
Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500GB |
|
Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB |
|
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB |
|
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB |
|
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS 500GB |
For $200 more Apple will swap the default 250GB SATA drive for a 500GB unit, manufacturer and model unspecified. Compared to the cost of a stand alone 500GB drive, Apple's upgrade is the cheapest you can get, however the better route is to have Apple leave the 250GB intact and simply pay $209 for another 500GB drive giving you a total of 750GB of storage for the same price that Apple would charge you for 500GB.
Populating the 2nd, 3rd and 4th drive bays with a 500GB drive costs $400 a pop at Apple, the choice here is simple: buy the drive on your own. Note that you can currently buy Seagate's 750GB drive for as little as $346, a far better bargain than Apple's $400 upgrades. Unlike video cards which require Mac specific versions, all SATA hard drives should work just fine on the Mac Pro.
Apple also moved to a two optical drive layout with the new Mac Pro; currently you have the option of upgrading to two SuperDrives, but we'd expect that in the future one of those bays may end up with a Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive in it.
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vladik007 - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
Flashing PC video cards to work on G5 was possible and in my own experience also rock solid. I have 2 G5;s at home ( one 2.0Ghz very 1st released ) and 2.7ghz. PNY 6800 GT with 2120 firmware has worked for over a year now and ZERO crashes in that time in both of them.So if PC videocards will NOT work in Mac Pro by just simply sliding in , firmware flashing will.
ViRGE - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
Anand, has Apple/Nvidia/ATI commented on what video card compatibility will be like with the Mac Pros over the PowerMacs? With the PowerMacs, PC video cards were incompatible due to OpenFirmware and more importantly endian issues. The Mac Pro however is EFI and not OpenFirmware, and there are no endian issues, which gives everyone a lot of hope that the system may be able to take on vanilla 7900's and the like.Has anyone said anything on this matter going one way or another?
blwest - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
I'll know tonight when I try to slap my 7800gt into the box!artifex - Friday, August 11, 2006 - link
He never came back... maybe he blew up his new Mac Pro?archcommus - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
Given that this hardware is just like a PC and 100% x86, and given that the new OS X is designed to run on that hardware, what is REALLY the obstacle in getting OS X to run on our own Windows and Linux machines?Missing Ghost - Monday, August 14, 2006 - link
yep OSX does not use the bios. It needs efiAaronAxvig - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
They still have the EFI boot system, no?mrgq912 - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
Back when Apple made they announcement that they were going to switch from power pc to intel cpus. I thought why intel and not amd? Now it seems that Intel must have shown them what their new hardware is capable of, and Apple didn't even need to think twice about the move. Good call by apple.But I still won't buy closed system like Mac pro.
hmurchison - Thursday, August 10, 2006 - link
Please don't take offense to this but that was really a silly statement. Back in the days when you had differing hardware between Macs and PCs you could say the Mac was more closed. Nowadays you have the ability to run OS X, Windows and Linux simultaneously and a lot of hardware will just plug and play with the appropriae minidrivers in the OS.mrgq912 - Saturday, August 12, 2006 - link
none taken. i didn't know that mac pros allowed you to switch video cards and memory. I always wanted to use the mac os for every day use, and have windows for games and such. But now the only thing stopping me is the price.