FYI for those of you wanting to try 3rd party larger drives...

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Level 2

475 points

FYI for those of you wanting to try 3rd party larger drives...

I know that this is unsupported by Apple, blah, blah, blah etc etc.

I have successfully R&D'ed and have a couple of production servers at clients running this config.

Seagate make an enterprise 1TB drive that works great with G5 Xserve's. I have one G5 Xserve running 3x 1TB drives, 2x as RAID1, 3rd as snapshot.
This has been running since October 09 without issue, reboots, booting after power loss, RAID is still active and reliable.

Apple have a matrix that says only certain drives can be used with Xserve models-
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1219

I am in the process of testing the new 2TB Seagate enterprise drives, and what do you know, they work in G5 and Intel Xserve's.

At this stage the 2TB is just a single drive, I will be testing RAID1 on 2 of these next week.

Will update on progress then...

Ed

MacBook Pro 2.4, Mac OS X (10.6.2), 4Gb Ram

Posted on Feb 22, 2010 10:02 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 23, 2010 2:49 AM in response to Ed Adams2

Actually Apple states that the dries listed in that PDF are "qualified" to work with the XServer. That doesn't necessarily mean that other drives will not work, but rather that Apple will not support them if they do not work.

Since you don't require Apple's support, no worries for you...

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Answer 2

Ed Adams2 Author

Level 2

475 points

Feb 23, 2010 9:28 AM in response to DaddyPaycheck

Actually Apple's stance on this is very firm, I have been told direct from an Apple engineer, no they wont work you will run into problems. Granted back when I first tried this 4 years ago, the Seagate drives did not work very well. Now they do, hence the post, there are many questions on this forum regarding this.
A lot of the Apple ADM units have explicit labels on the boxes that say- This drive will only work with Intel Xserve's on OS X 10.x.x

This post is aimed at people that do not have warranty or are close to the end of it. There are a lot of businesses around in these current financial times that have to think outside the square to extend the life of current equipment and cannot afford Apple's premium on drives and ADM's.

I have clients here with Xserve G5's and original Intel models that are well out of warranty, that have 250-750GB drives, they are being told your only upgrade paths are-
500 GB ADM's from Apple for G5 at double price of standard enterprise drives or
1 TB ADM's from Apple for Intel at double price of standard enterprise drives or
New Xserve as the previous models wont support higher drive capacities.

I have an Xserve single G5 2.0 (original model) running 10.3.9 happily running for 5 months on a 1TB 3rd party mirror, this server is in a production environment and has not skipped a beat since last year, about 50 users hammering it for 16 hours a day including a Windows job management system using it for storage and backup.

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Answer 3

Ed Adams2 Author

Level 2

475 points

Mar 24, 2010 10:56 AM in response to Ed Adams2

2TB Seagate enterprise drives work in a G5 with OS X Server 10.3.5

I never thought it would, but it does, RAID1 builds fine, it must be a 10.3.5 installer though other wise it will not boot. RAID is stable through soft/hard reboots and pulling the power.

So anyone who wishes to know the details about setup just drop me an email (in my profile)

Regards
Ed

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Answer 4

normtodd

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2010 3:57 PM in response to Ed Adams2

I just had a mirrored array in my xserve degrade, and was horrifyed by the cost of the 'appropriate' adms for my xserve.

figuring I could use the drives elsewhere if this did not work, I ordered 2 1TB western digital server class (re3) drives and put them in the sleds. no joy. disk manager showed nothing installed.

i then jumpered the drive pins on each drive to slow the drive down from sata 3 Gb/s to 1.5 Gb/s. both drives came up perfectly. I set up the new mirror array and its good to go.

your mileage may vary of course, but it worked for me.

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Answer 5

Ed Adams2 Author

Level 2

475 points

Mar 25, 2010 4:23 AM in response to normtodd

Yeah, I found the 1TB drives I used last year required jumpers, ones I have used this year not.Both Seagate's

The 2TB drives do not seem to require jumpers either.

I did look at the WD RAID drives but they are a tad more expensive than the Seagates down here.

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