I'm planning to buy the new 3 Tb SATA drives fr Seagate to be used on the older 16-core 2.93 Ghz Mac Pro. It's based on the Nehalem Intel. Will the Mac Pro recognize all 3 Tb if I format it as a GUID with Leopard or Snow Leopard OS? Any special tricks to get it to work when installing as a non-raid SATA drive #2-4?
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.9)
You cannot successfully use 3TB drives with the Mac Pro RAID card.
There are dire warnings on sites where 3TB drives are sold. This is because they tend to use 4K blocks instead of the traditional 1/2K blocks. If the formatter program does not carefully align the logical Volumes to Physical Disk Block boundaries, OS logical Blocks are split across Hard Drive physical Blocks and performance will be horrible.
Mac OS X has correctly formatted 4K block devices correctly since at least Mac OS X 10.4, and probably much longer. Be sure to use Mac OS X to do the initial partitioning, NOT WINDOWS. Enjoy your new 3TB drive.
Apple markets the two Quad processor Nehalem 2.93GHz as two Four-core processors with HyperThreading.
I understand that it seems to have 16 effective processors. (My quad-core 2.93 Nehalem registers itself to Mac OS and Activity Monitor as having eight (effective) processors.)
But you are inviting abuse by referring to it as a 16-processor machine.
Got the core confused here. It's a 2 x Quad Nehalem 2.93 Ghz. I see 16 green bars on the CPU meter, thinking that has 16 cores. It's not. Fact cleared.
You can thank the marketing dept! calling 'cores' when you have Hyperthreading and logical cores, or two threads per core.
No harm.
The drive works beautifully as a normal drive, no special setup or configuration is necessary. I've got a Hitachi 3TB in one of my drive bays now (on a 2009 Mac Pro), and will eventually replace all my 2TB drives.
3 Tb sata hd compatibility on Mac Pro 2010 Nehalem
