XServe and 3rd Party Seagate drives

Are the seagates that are in the machine now apple units? Did you get this current seagate new or used?

If you search you will find several threads with people discussing the incompatibility of Intel Xserves with 3rd party drives. The G5s seem okay with certain models but the Intel based ones are not. Some people report that drives will eventually mount after a delay if left in the machines but this makes them unreliable and unbootable.

My guess is that Apple flashes the firmware to extend the drive functionality and while earlier Xserves would operate without this the newer machines demand the extended functionality to mount and operate.

You can search the threads here and the web but the consensus seems to be you need Apple drives for reliable operation.

=Tod

There is nothing I'm aware of in Disk Utility that will change a drive to make an Xserve recognize it. Assuming I'm right about Apple flashing the firmware of the drives they do that to the disks before they ship them to extend their functionality.

The reports I saw for the non-Apple disks always seemed to correlate to Intel boxes only but I'm sure the majority of those people were running 10.5/6 so it probably is a combination of those two things. (I know that 10.5 on the G5 Xserves are way less picky about drives than the Intels.) Short of moving to Apple supplied disks I don't know of anything that will help you. Hopefully someone else has a better suggestion but I haven't heard of one.

Good luck,

=Tod

I agree with Tod, sadly its apple drives that are a sure thing.

The only other thing you could try is setting the jumper on that new seagate to 1.5mbps or sata1

This downgrades the speed but some peope have reported that this works for them.

Also what sled are you using? Is it the one with the black sata cables or is it the one where both cables are together and has an orange ribbon connector?

The problem is not in the HDD I think... it is with the RAID card.

Try to run any AHT on this Server.

I know that this is pretty old, but since I spent some time figuring this out myself I share. It is the speed that is the problem, and the drive has to be limited to Sata 150. Here is the page I found:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193991en

This was good for drives I just recently bought.

The hardest thing you might run into is getting the jumpers. I was just about to get out the soldering iron, before I remembered my pile of old stuff that I haven't gotten rid of. The old jumpers might be a little big, but they do work.

You may want to try and fromat the drive exactly the same size as the old apple ones.

Check this site as he states :

The new non-Apple drive MUST have at LEAST as much storage capacity as the Apple drive you are replacing. I know - this sounds obvious at first, but it is NOT. For example, if you are replacing an Apple 500GB drive with a Western Digital 500GB, the ACTUAL formatted capacity of the WD drive MUST BE EQUAL TO OR MORE than the Apple drive. I have had instances where the new non-Apple drive formatted at a capacity that was only a few k less than the Apple drive and it would NOT work. Not all 500GB drives format at the exact same capacity. For example, my Apple 500GB had a formatted capacity of 465.76GB but the WD only had something like 465.72GB - this small difference was enough to cause the XServe RAID to reject the WD drive as a replacement in the existing RAID Array.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=738389