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 7200.12 drives. This new drive model has a denser platter (thus reducing the number of platter and the power usage to spin them) and higher performance - up around 125 MBsec! They will replace all the current 7200.11 drives as production starts to ramp up. The 7200.12 culminates in a 2 TB drive that we are eagerly awaiting to test and offer to our customers. Stay tuned for results.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives. Great drive, still a perfect choice for your storage even though being replaced with a newer model. You will see 100 plus MB/sec data transfers off the outer tracks on these drives making them a speedy choice. 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. All drives sold from MacGurus since Dec 8th '08, when Seagate released a firmware update, have been updated to latest firmware revision by MacGurus technicians before shipping.

1.5 TB Seagate drives! Testing is showing that these drives with their larger platters are 20% faster than anything we have ever tested, including the earlier 7200.11 drives. 120-125 MB/sec is nothing to sneeze at. Comapatibility is unchanged. Priced the best per GB of any new release to date.

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.

While we used to recommend Western Digital Raptors as a performance enhancing upgrade, current models are excessively expensive and being based on a 2.5 inch platter give less performance than their cost would justify. While great great savings in power usage for huge server data rooms with hundreds ove drives are to be had using these superb drives, the realized savings for desktop computers is marginal at best.