Max Firewire drive capactity

Question

Level 3

806 points

Max Firewire drive capactity

Hi all,

I have a WD My Book Studio II striped giving 2TB on my Firewire 800 port.

WD now have a 2TB drive available, I plan to swap out the two 1TB drives for the newer 2TB drives, it looks like the My Book will support these new drives. So I get a 4TB FW800 disk!

*But will my FW800 port support a 4TB disk?*

(The two 1TB disks will replace older disks I have inside my MacPro)

Disk performance is OK for me, but low operating noise levels are very important to me. Hence using these WD green disks, low noise and low temperature than regular disks.

Note: Apple Does not support disk sizes greater than 1TB on its SATA ports, well on my 2006 MacPro anyway.

MacPro 2.66GHz, 11gig RAM, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Aug 4, 2009 11:26 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Aug 4, 2009 11:36 PM in response to Tim Cox

FireWire has no size limit on disk drives. There were some FireWire enclosures that had a 128 GB limit for their drives, but newer enclosures have no limit.

The Mac Pro has no size limit on its drives, but there are some drives with firmware that doesn't work properly with the Mac Pro SATA ports. This is not related to the drive size, and should be fixable by new drive firmware.

Reply

Answer 2

Tim Cox Author

Level 3

806 points

Aug 4, 2009 11:41 PM in response to Malcolm Rayfield

Thanks for the answer about FW800.

But I am not sure about your answer on SATA, I originally wanted to connect the My Book to SATA, my MacPro not recognize the drive, not even that anything was connected. Connecting through FW800 was slower 😟 but usable.

So I had a look around and it seems there is a 1TB limit, I have also seen a posting from someone in here complaining that a new WD 2TB disk does not get recognized by the MacPro SATA port.

Maybe its a WD problem? Nnless someone can confirm they have directly connected a >1TB disk to a SATA port.

Reply

Answer 3

Aug 5, 2009 12:10 AM in response to Tim Cox

Firmware problems happen with new design drives, which are usually large drives. SATA ports and OSX don't have drive size limits. When new drives are made, the manufactures may just test then on PCs, so there can be problems that don't show up until customers try them in other computers. Eventually they fix the firmware to meet SATA standards.

Reply

Answer 4

Tim Cox Author

Level 3

806 points

Aug 5, 2009 12:28 AM in response to Malcolm Rayfield

I agree there could be firmware issues, it seems to happen more often these days.

I am sure all HD manufacturing plants will not use a PC to sample test drives, they will have a automated test rig that will run the disk through some tests. Also to test the SATA command set.

Anyway, still not convinced on using >1TB drives in a MacPro.

Reply

Answer 5

Aug 5, 2009 12:46 AM in response to Tim Cox

When the first 1TB drives appeared, there were some with problems on the Mac Pro, but they all work fine now. 1.5 GB drives also had problems at first. Now 2 GB have problems. Eventually the drive makers may learn.

Reply

Answer 6

Aug 5, 2009 8:37 PM in response to Tim Cox

Tim Cox wrote:
...someone can confirm they have directly connected a >1TB disk to a SATA port.

i have a 1.5 seagate ST31500341AS for about two weeks now. No problems.

Reply