150GB Raptor?

Just an observation but you and Mike Bisom1 have G5 2.7s and FAI has a G5 Quad, maybe the problem is only apparent on the previous G5s or only on the 2.7.

(coming soon) Quad G5, 3GBs Ram, 23' Cinema Display Mac OS X (10.4.4) RME Fireface 800

So far I have kept mine in. I have never used the boot drive for such large files and everything else does seem snappier and so far no other problems. The problem is also inconsistent, at least in my case. I was able to copy a 30gig folder from a local drive at least once. And it has failed to do that at least twice.

Mike

I just finished a weekend of testing, and the bad news is that the Raptor 150 DOES NOT WORK with the Power Mac G5. I tried two Quad G5's, two Dual 2.7's, a single 1.8, and an original dual 2.0. I tried three different Raptor 150's.

To make a long story short, ALL of these machines locked up with a spinning beachball during copying some amount of data. Sometimes it worked through a full 135GB copy, other times it locked up after 1.5 GB of a 80GB transfer. We could not pin down any sort of rhyme or reason. The crashes were completely random.

Changing jumper settings didnt affect a thing and the drives still locked up. It is almost as if the drive just stops responding. We also tried switching bays from A to B and B to A. Nothing. Booting from the drive works, but we also got several blue screen freezes halfway through the boot process. Tried various versions of 10.3 and 10.4. Nothing seemed to fix the random freezing.

This is total and utter bullsh** and completely Apple's fault. Using any of the above configurations with the Sonnet SATA or SIIG SATA offering worked perfectly. We saw no spinning beachballs of death, or any other freezes. Clearly there is something wrong with Apple's onboard SATA implementation. To gimp a high-performance hard drive like this is ridiculous and small oversights like these ones make Apple look oh so childish.


[UPDATE]

The new WD SATA 400GB drives exhibit the same problems as the Raptor 150's. Be advised that you WILL lose data. Do not use these drives in a G5 under any circumstances.


Come on apple, what's your response to this? Western Digital didn't make hard drives that fit YOUR serial ata spec?

Amen to that...

I've been trying to tell people about this problem for weeks. They only hear what they want to hear.
And for my Raptor 150, it's sitting in a eSATA enclosure with 3 other drives. It's like locking up an Olympic Sprinter with a bunch of gimpy old men...this is sad and pathetic.

I think Apple knows about this, they simply cannot "not" be aware of a major HD company's drives not working correctly in their flagship computers. I just hope a simple firmware solution will be available soon.

Like the other poster said, "you can use it in Windows..."
That's just the problem, "I don't like Windows..."

Nikoman (or others),
Sorry to hear about your struggles with the Raptor 150. I've been considering using one as an internal boot in a new G5 yet to be purchased. So I'm wondering if/when you have a chance to load 10.4.5, does the drive performance improve? Did you change any of the jumpers as part of your problem solving with the drive? I, like others, remain hopeful that we can successfully use the Raptor.

I'm not struggling anymore, like I mentioned earlier, the Raptor 150 sits in a eSATA box. I think the beast is so fast that Apple can't contain its ferocious appetite for speed. You ought to see the burst rates on this thing, it's so crazy that my RAIDs (2 of them) can't keep up. Even the sustained write speed is phenominal, it's not just the benchmarks...this thing is really lively in real world usage. Boot times are quick, UT2004 loads in no time at all and things just spring to life.
Man, it just makes me cry...not being able to use this thing as a boot drive.
I could use it as a boot drive with no problems to start, it's later that it starts to corrupt data after using simple disk utilities for regular maintenance.

It would be nice to know whether this really is a controller hardware issue that can't be circumvented or a OS driver issue.

If you have to the time and fighting spirit, why not try what happens under Linux. For example, grab ubuntu livecd and partition/format the drive with linux tools and do some large file copying and take MD5 sums to verify the copies.

I'm interested, because there seem to be many reports of recent drives not working with the G5's sata controllers, but not a single one of the reports I've seen have some basis for blaming the controller instead of the driver. If it turns out to be a driver issue, it's easy enough to throw at Apple's OS X guys.

UPDATE: Didn't find any mention on Broadcom's (AFAIK makers of the SATA controller in G5) site of incompatibilities with WD drives.

Yep, I already checked that this past weekend. There is no incompatibility with the controller. It is strictly the driver. I would imagine that any sort of linux test would pass with flying colors. Someone at apple did not adhere to the Sata spec and as such is causing these drives to go offline in the middle of a transfer.

So what you're saying is that this can be fixed by a simple update?
It would be great to know that there is some hope for the G5...

Another thing to verify, if you actually use Linux to verify that the drive works with the Mac hardware, is that it not only completes the transfers reliably, but performs as quickly as expected. While stability is #1 priority, performance was the reason behind buying a Raptor.

I've been trying to tell people about this problem
for weeks. They only hear what they want to hear.

An official acknowlwdgement from WesternDigital regarding this problem.

I still have yet to experience any problem with these drives in my Quad...
-but then again, I haven't yet been able to test my system with individual really large files (>20GB).

It really does sound like Apple needs a SATA driver update to fix this problem though.

I've sent Apple a note about this; other 150GB Raptor/WD4000 owners should do so also.


G5 Quad Mac OS X (10.4)

If you check out xlr8yourmac.com, there's a guy who bought 5 Raptor 150's and they all failed him in 2 Quads, 2 dual 2.7's and a 1.8 G5. You can say he's just a little more than slightly angry at Apple right now.
That's nice that Western Digital has publicly announced something about the G5 being very lacking in the SATA department. If I would've known this months ago I wouldn't have bothered buying a G5 only to find out later that I can't use some of the best HD's in the world.
I'm so disappointed...

Anybody testing the Raptor 150gb with 10.4.5?

I'm on the wagon...not touching another Raptor 150.
I've spent countless hours last month trying to get that thing to work. I'll just be the guy standing around now watching for the first post saying that it finally works.

OK, I might fall off the wagon if there's a slight rumor that it's fixed.

Back to the decaf Raptor 74 for now...

Hey guys,
it appears that the issue is growing...

Now check out xlr8yourmac.com and see all the hoopla about the Raptor 150 and other Western Digital drives. It appears as though every HD manufacturer will be making drives this way. This means no Hard Drive will work in a G5 in the very near future, according to Western Digital.