Seagate 7200.10 and jumper pins

First, Apple Discussions do not provide tech support for third-party products. Seagate has a website and tech support telephone number.

The jumpers to which you refer configure the drive for use on SATA I or SATA II controllers, respectively. Mac Pros support both which is why there's no change when you changesd the jumpers.

The likely reason for performance is that you haven't prepped the drive. The drive likely comes pre-formatted from the factory MSDOS. Do the following:

Extended Hard Drive Preparation

1. Open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder.

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.

4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.

5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.

6. Click on the Erase button. The format process will take 30 minutes to an hour or more depending upon the drive size.

Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

No offense taken. However, technical information regarding what ROM versions work or don't work on a Seagate drive product is really not in the venue of the Apple Discussions. A call to Seagate's tech support would have already answered your question. That's pretty much what others have had to do if they get one of the 'defective' drives.

Apple posted "Hard Drive Update 1.0" specifically to address and update Seagate firmware for some Mac Pro systems. In the past, Seagate would handle customers one on one; then stopped that policy so that we could and usually meant you needed access to a PC or RMA the drive, plus there were a lot of threads and things like taking 90 seconds to have a SEagate drive (in iMac G5s) spin backup.

Seagate wanted OEMs to handle firmware patches. OWC always checks their drives before shipping. And there were performance problems with Seagate units inside Mac Pro.

So there are thousands of posts on the subject of Seagate drives, firmware etc on Apple Discussions.

One good place to check is http://www.xlr8yourmac.com which has a reader drive DB that you can search and add to and reports about problems etc with various drive models.

They aren't the fastest drives in the world to be honest. I bought the 500GB version, and it's pants. It really is junk, im going to replace it with one of those "Green" WD Terabyte Drives at some point.

You have done the correct thing with that jumper, removing it is correct, it means that the bus runs at 3gbit/sec (SATA2) instead of 1.5gbit/sec (SATA1), so reads from and writes to the cache will be twice as fast.

Here we go:

Model: ST3500630AS
Revision: 3.AAK

I got about 55 Mb/sec read speed, which is poor. It should be about 80 Mb/sec. I knew when I bought it I should have bought a WD instead...won't make that mistake again. 😉

This is the drive that i'm looking at getting, variable spin speed so it uses less energy and is quieter too.

WD Caviar GP

Yeah, i'm waiting at the moment to see if they come down in price a bit, then I'll get 1 to test and then seriously consider swapping them all out for those if they are as good as they claim to be. 🙂
The reason why you loose so much, is because a 750 GB isn't actually 750 GB, it's 750000000000 bytes, which is about 698GB. 😉 If you do the calculation: 750000000000/1024/1024/1024 it comes out at 698.49GB, which is the size of your drive.

Well, it's a shame that my post was deleted, because what I was saying was right. But, stuff em. lol, maybe I shouldn't have been so directly personal, but I find it hard when someone is being arrogant like that.
It seems that some of the people on these forums with 5 little blue things think they are god, that is all, and they just come out with illogical and timewasting rubbish to make themselves look good, then go running off and complain to the mod and get any deserving replies deleted.

Anyway, i'm not complaining, difference of opinion, thats all. 😉

You're welcome.

There are a couple places where this slow performance was posted.

This forum. One person took their new 500GB Seagate and it took 4-5X longer to zero than it should. Won't get into why they or anyone would, but it should have run in less time.

Barefeats http://www.barefeats.com - has report on Mac Pro drive performance looking at 10 different drives and models.

Accelerate Your Mac http://www.xlr8yourmac.com

Getting vendors to publicly confirm or have Mac (un) support in their knowledge base seems to keep getting harder. I love my WD drives but they have had mixed messages about Mac support - they are probably as confused by what and why as any of us!

Some G5s did not "auto-negotiate" between 1.5 and 3.0 mode, they came out before SATA drives were barely dry behind the ears and all of the drives in '03 were just PATA drives with an SATA bridge, so not really native SATA. The jumper just forces the drive to work in older systems.

The problem with Seagate I think was something to do with slow writes with small files mostly. You can break it down into sequential vs random, read vs write, small vs large - and a drive should perform over a wide range of patterns. But these drives are skewed.

Even the latest Seagate ES (Enterprise) 7200.11s have poor performance specs and not even as good as their consumer grade 7200.11 Barracudas. http://www.techreport.com

WD has had firmware that favors better writing versus read speed. The 10K Raptor shows over 10MB/sec difference in the two.

Users do need to be aware of drive performance and firmware issues, unfortunately, when making a decision of what to buy. Editing, scratch, RAID, boot drive, video vs graphics vs database, will affect your choice.

I would not let warranty or brand name affect my decision personally and have only found favor with Seagate's 15K line of Cheetah.

The drive will perform better external running off a PCI SATA controller such as the one's reviewed by AMUG that michael links to - that would be the best way to use it and remove it from the Mac Pro.

Anyway, when I removed the drive I noticed the label had two jumper settings; 2 left pins jumpered = 1.5GBs and no pins jumpered = 3GBs. I noticed that the two pins relating to the 1.5GBs were jumpered so I removed them I put the drive back in and mounted it and all seems well but I just wondered if I was okay to do it? Would this cause any problems does anyone know?

Removing the pins for 3GB performance works fine with the Mac Pro.

Have fun!

Thanks so much for the all the info on installing the drive Kappy!

After reading these posts I realized I should have checked that pin setting before installing the drive. So I'm waiting for it to zero right now and it's telling me almost 2 hours. Any idea if i can then physically remove the drive and check that setting (switch it to 3gb/s if it's not the default) and re-insert it without having to zero it again? I wonder if the default (meaning how i received it from the store) was 1.5bg/s or 3gb/s. with my luck it's 1.5 🙂

thanks again!
happy holidays

There is no relationship between 150MB/sec mode jumper and zeroing the drive. And small writes as the zero-all uses take an inordinate amount of time due to poor firmware issues.