Maximum disc drive size and speed?

I want to install new enterprise quality boot drives in two MacPro towers before I upgrade to Lion because my Snow Leopard installs have been buggy and unstable.  The current drives offer 2 & 3 TB capacity, 6.0Gb/s interfaces and 64 MB Cache.  I don't know the difference between SATA I and SATA II.  Nor do I know how much the original MacPro (2006) and the 2nd generation (early 2008) can handle.  Will the new drives simply perform at the maximum capability of the internal bus?

Yes, Enterprise drives both typically carry a longer warranty and are actually individually tested. Consumer drives are left to the buyers to do the quality control testing, in my opinion a travesty. But one we can handle by carefully testing all drives before putting them into production.
Mechanically a Enterprise drive is the same as a desktop drive. So MTBF is a factor of quality control and just plain warranty dollars instead of actual life span. They charge more for drives that have a higher warranty and MTBF rating - mostly it comes down to difference in marketing.
Big difference with an Enterprise drive is it has firmware features and functions designed for a multiuser server environment. That means the drive is optimized to enhance multi user access, a stacked command kind of load that no desktop computer has to typically duplicate.
You won't have many issues running standard issue Enterprise drives inside a MacPro. The Intel chipset pretty much ignores all those fancy server features and seems to be capable of handling most of them without problems. Lots of problems attaching Enterprise drives to eternal hosts though, from Firewire to USB to eSATA and even hardware RAID controllers, those features get in the way as often as not.
As long as the Enterprise drives do not have specific firmware for some arcane OEM you should be fine. Personally, I just stick with simpler cheaper desktop drives. I can move them around to external storage as well without having compatibility issues.
Rick

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