What drive in Mac Pro early 2008 or 2009?

Question

I purchased a Western Digital Black 1Tb SATA hard drive and it did not work in any of my three Mac Pros (two are Early 2008, one is early 2009). It made a strange noise and was never seen by Disk Utility no matter what I did.
There are already three other drives in these machines, some of them are Western Digital drives and they work fine, but they were purchased years ago.
I returned the drive and purchased a Western Digital Red 1Tb drive in replacement. I chose a Red because I will be setting up a RAID system soon but needed it temporarily as storage in the Mac Pro. It didn't work at all in the Mac Pro Early 2008. At first it seemed to work but at restart, the system said the disk was not formatted, although I had formatted it successfully (but it really took a long time) with Disk Utility.
On the Mac Pro Early 2009 formatting was difficult. I tried to make two partitions instead of one and finally managed to format it and even copy some files to it. But Disk Utility couldn't verify it and Disk Warrior said it was having problems because of disk malfunction.
Apparently, I should be able to put a 1Tb disk in these machines, and the SATA 3 drives are supposed to be compatible with the SATA 2 of the Mac Pros. But it doesn't work although we spent hours trying everything and reading everything we could find on the subject.
My question is: are these drives supposed to work in older Mac Pros from 2008 and 2009?
If not, what drive should I purchase for these machines? I need a quiet, fast drive.
Thanks.
Ellen

Answer 1

Yes, I'm aware that SSD is the way to go. I have one (OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD), 480 GB, as my boot disk. It has the system and all my apps, plus my virtual machines for Windows. These are used very little, only to check if things we put on the web are OK in the various Win Browsers. But they need to be fast because otherwise, I'll go nuts.
About using SSD for Photoshop's scratch, I seem to remember reading something saying that it will reduce the drive's life somewhat. I don't know how much or if it matters, or if it's the better choice anyway.
Actually, the reason we still have these old Mac Pros (two for work, one for the server) is that, every year, we hoped to see some major improvement and put off upgrading because we didn't feel the new ones announced year after year would change our life.
We've been using Macs for almost 30 years now. The first was a Mac Plus 512k, in January 1985. (My first computer (in 1981) was a ZX81, with 1k of RAM... I did get a 16 k plug in extension though). We usually upgrade when the specs show a speed improvement of at least 4X, or when the architecture changes radically. All this to say we are now waiting to spend all our Christmas money on some shiny new tubular Mac Pros. We will then have to reconsider our whole setup,  and add some external Thunderbolt drives. At that time, I'll be back to discuss the best options. Till then, this will do.
And the reason we tried a Red was because we thought maybe we could use it later on a dedicated machine used only for music over the network. The drive is used just about continuously all day long. Bad idea obviously.