Is it possible to install an 8TB Seagate Iron Wolf disc as a backup disk for my other drives in my Mac Pro mid 2010? I'm running High Sierra OS 10.13.6 and plan to use Disk Utility to erase and format the disk as HFS+. Will this work?
Mac Pro, macOS 10.13
An internal drive is not a backup drive, unless your primary drive is external.
If the computer fails, due to power surge, dust clogging the fans, or water damage, how can an internal drive be a backup drive?
Yes, you can install a SATA 8 TB hard drive into a Mac Pro mid-2010. But something else will need to be backing it up in event the computer fails and everything on it, and every drive in the computer fails.
Yes formatting it HFS + Extended will work on a platter drive. That will allow it to be used as a boot drive if you installed an OS on it.
High Sierra will make SSD drives APFS automatically.
An internal drive is not a backup drive, unless your primary drive is external.
If the computer fails, due to power surge, dust clogging the fans, or water damage, how can an internal drive be a backup drive?
Yes, you can install a SATA 8 TB hard drive into a Mac Pro mid-2010. But something else will need to be backing it up in event the computer fails and everything on it, and every drive in the computer fails.
Yes formatting it HFS + Extended will work on a platter drive. That will allow it to be used as a boot drive if you installed an OS on it.
High Sierra will make SSD drives APFS automatically.
Further note, the Iron Wolf drives are 6Gbps SATA. They will work perfectly fine on the SATA 3Gbps bus in the 2010 Mac Pro but you will not benefit from the drive's higher potential transfer speed.
I am curious as to your reason for using a single 8TB drive, esp. for backup. That strikes me as risky with so much data on a single drive.
And on that topic, an internal drive is not a sufficient backup because it's subject to all the same risks that your working drives are subject to in the same system. To be effective, backups should always be on external drives and even then, the drives should only be connected during backup & restore operations, not all the time.
Hmmm, Apple says...
Up to 8TB of internal storage6 in bays 1 through 4 using hard drives or solid-state drives in the following capacities:
Mac Pro (Mid 2010) - Technical Specifications (apple.com)
But may have been tops available at the time, OWC says four 8TB OK...
Hard drive upgrade: Add up to 32.0TB of HDD storage
Detailed System Specifications Compiled by OWC (macsales.com)
And if you do buy, carefully read the specs for your chosen drive ... Iron Wolf drives up to 10TB come in 5400 rpm, 5900 rpm and 7200 rpm flavors and may have cache as low as 64MB. It's only the Iron Wolf Pro drives that are all 7200rpm and 256MB cache.
My plan is to use the internal 8TB drive to back up pro tools music sessions, then withdraw the drive from the Mac Pro until such time as another backup is needed. I want to remaster these projects in my new Mac Studio, copying them from the Mac Pro a few at a time. So the backup drive will serve as a kind of archive for the original studio recordings. The Seagate Iron Wolf has 256MB cache. so it should be reliable and up to the task. I will also store the remastered songs on my iCloud account. Thanks for all the help. You cleared up a lot of confusion!
After reading everyone's replies, I realize that external backup is really a much better option. I ordered a Western Digital 8TB My Cloud EX2 external NAS drive )with 2x4TB drives. I plan to use Time Machine to make Mirrored backups of my Mac computers. Thank you all for the excellent advice.
Agreed with Martin.
Great, take care my friend! :)
👍+1
8TB internal Backup Disk for Mac Pro mid 2010
