Apple - Mac Pro - Storage and RAID options for your Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro delivers more processing power, more graphics performance, and more storage options. It’s the world’s newest superpower.

Store more.

Massive storage.

The Mac Pro comes with four 3.5-inch drive bays for an enormous amount of internal storage — up to 8TB when you install four 2TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drives.¹ Each bay provides its own independent 3Gb/s channel for fast access to data. And thanks to the cable-free, direct-attach installation system, adding (or replacing) hard drives is a surprisingly simple process.

Choose solid-state for ultimate performance.

New to the Mac Pro is the option to add up to four 512GB solid-state drives — or any combination of solid-state and hard drives.² Solid-state drives have no moving parts and are capable of accessing data at speeds up to 230MB per second, which is up to twice the speed of hard drives. The result? Incredible performance on a range of data-intensive tasks, including up to 2x faster ProRes video encoding using solid-state drives compared with hard drives.³

Maximum performance and capacity for demanding I/O requirements. Data spans multiple drives to deliver incredible read and write performance. No redundancy.

Maximum protection for critical data. Identical data is written to multiple drives simultaneously.

Data protection against a drive failure, strong performance, and efficient capacity utilization.

A mirror of striped drive pairs providing higher performance than RAID 1 and stronger data protection than RAID 0.

Ready to RAID

For data protection and enhanced SATA hard drive performance, add the Mac Pro RAID Card with 512MB of RAID cache, a 72-hour cache-protecting battery, and hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 0+1.² A cableless connection and intuitive Apple software make it a snap to install this optional card. It’s the perfect solution for workgroup servers, video pros working with high-bit-rate assets, or anyone who wants to protect critical data.

Even without a RAID card, Mac OS X lets you stripe two, three, or all four drives — either solid-state or hard drives — in a RAID 0 array to increase performance and create a massive volume for tasks such as video editing; or create a RAID 1 mirror to protect digital media assets from a drive failure.

Double-layer burner times two.

Sure it’s great to have one 18x SuperDrive at your disposal, but think how much more productive you could be if you add a second optional SuperDrive. Imagine backing up your data to two double-layer DVDs at once. Or burning Aperture projects to one DVD, while importing music from a CD into your iTunes library. With two optical drive bays in every system, the Mac Pro lets you do exactly that.

SSD I/O PerformanceDisk I/O performance
Final Cut StreamsRAID 0 performance

SSD I/O Performance. Up to 2x faster than 7200-rpm hard disk drive.

Testing conducted by Apple in July 2010 using preproduction Mac Pro 12-core 2.93GHz units configured with 6GB of RAM, 1TB 7200-rpm hard disk drive and 512GB solid-state drive. Testing conducted using Iometer 2006.07.27 with a 30-second ramp-up, 5-minute run duration, 128KB request size, 8 outstanding IOs, and 150GB test file. Average rotational media performance calculated by creating the test file on the outer, middle, and inner sectors of the drive and averaging the results from all three measurements. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Pro.

Simultaneous Final Cut Studio Streams. Three-drive RAID 0 performance.

Testing conducted by Apple in July 2010 using preproduction Mac Pro 12-core 2.93GHz units configured with 6GB of RAM. The test system was configured in a two-volume configuration with a single JBOD drive for the OS and the remaining three drives as the test volume. Testing was conducted with Final Cut Pro 7.0.2 using simultaneous unique 10-minute clips for each content type. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Pro.