Crucial RealSSD 128GB to a 2007 XServe

I have attempted to put an SSD as a boot drive into a G5 XServe (10.4.11) and a Xeon XServe (10.6.7).

The drive was a OWC 60GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G.

I cloned the original boot drive with Carbon Copy Cloner in both cases. In the G5, I got a kernel panic on boot. In the Xeon, I had the same experience as you; the drive would not be recognized.

OWC sent me a replacement drive to try. The results were identical with the Xeon XServe.

Interestingly, both XServers would work fine if I used the SSD in a Voyager dock and the FireWire 800 port.

I asked tech support at OWC to kick this up to their development team, today.

The issue is that apple really tried to corner the drive market with the xserve. The only drives that will reliably work every time is an apple branded server class drive. All external drives will work just fine its just the internal ADM drives that will cause issues. Others have found that certain model hard drives will work. Some found that using a jumper to swich from 3gb to 1.5gb made the drive work.

Anyway good luck it would be great to find an ssd drive that would work as a boot drive.

The only one aftermarket SSD I found to WORK in the 2006 Xserve Xeon is the OCZ Vertex 2 3,5". Other drives I tried and found NOT to be recognized (to spare you the pain): Crucial M4, Samsung 840 Pro Series, SuperTalent SuperNova SSD.

Add-on: The Vertex 2 in its 2.5" variant works as well. 😉

anybody know if vertex 4's will work??

thanks.

OCZ Vertex 4 VTX4-25SAT3-256G 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC

just to follow up, this drive (vertex 4) actually did mount on my system (!!), finally after trying crucial m4 and owc and some kingston thing, this one works. so far. am cloning to it now, but it formatted and passed fsck several times. so fingers crossed.

wanted to post in case anyone else is trying to keep the venerable old xserve alive. i like the thing. will miss it when it's finally gone. fortunately for me the computing power in it is all i need to run the operation here, so as long as it kicks, it'll have a job.

fwiw.

i take it back. it mounted. it formatted. it took a clone. it passed utility tests. it repaired perms. it passed util again. restart. didn't see it. restart. didn't see it. new bay. didn't see it. amber light. red light. new bay. red light. restart. no joy.

well. it mounted for a while. but this is in no way useable as a server drive.

this. really. *****.

i was getting very excited to finally migrate some volumes to ssd.

APPLE! what are you doing to me here???? this is bs. could you kindly allow us to use ssd's on the xserve for f----s sake!

***.

anyway. f. y. i......

As I said earlyer: try to get a Vertex 2. That definitely works and has enough horsepower for the Xserve. 😉

thx semmel. i did pay attention to your post, that's why i asked about the 4, which, yes, is overkill for the xserve in terms of speed.

so, i tracked down a vertex 2 and will try.

but can you tell me, have you successfully used a 2 as a boot drive on xserve, and what is your failure rate with it, uptime?

thx for replying!

hello

anyone, tried xServe 2006 Late with SSD OCZ Vertex 4 128Gb ?

i need to format to macosx fs SSD before boot from install-dvd or i can boot with unformated ssd?

I had been using a 3.5" model (Vertex 2) as boot drive in my late 2006 Xserve since July 2011 and recently replaced it with a 2.5" Vertex 2 with bigger capacity. As I said, it runs as a boot drive and also runs a database on it. Works like a charm!

The Vertex 4 obviously will not work as boot drive though.

For the benefit of anyone installing an SSD in an Intel Xeon Xserve hard drive caddy, the Samsung 840 Evo proved impossible to initialize, and was only recognised intermittently by OS X. The Intel 530 series is occasionally not recognised on a cold start but is always visible after a restart and has been working for several months as my boot drive without any problems.

I just tried some things today with our Xserve 2009 (3,1) with RAID card, but I think, that most if this stuff can be done with Xserves from 2006 (1,1) and 2008 (2,1) also:

A modern SATA SSD did not work in any real Xserve SATA-HDD drive module I have here. I have tested this with many different SATA drive modules and finally gave up.

In SATA drive modules the drive is connected to the little controller board at the back of the module using two black cables with black plugs - the smaller one for data, the wider one for power. AFAIK those SATA drive modules only support 1.5 Gbps and this is in many cases the reason, why modern 6 Gbps SSDs might not work.

But I still had this in mind:

You cannot use SAS drives in a SATA drive modules, but you can use SATA drives in SAS drive modules.

SAS is backwards compatible to SATA.

What I found out, is, that Apple shipped several drive modules which show on the bottom of the drive module, that they are SATA modules, but in fact, when you open them and remove the SATA drive, it turns out, that they are SAS drive modules. You can verify that reading the product code printed onto the little barcode label at the bottom of the drive bay inside the module. In SAS drive modules the drive is connected to one combined plug with data and power connector and only one wide transluscent copper flex cable. AFAIK those drive modules all support 3 Gbps and so many modern SATA HDDs and also SSDs should work.

I have successfully tested a Kingston Hyper X Fury 120 GB SSD (max. 6 GBps) in a 620-4575 SAS HDD Carrier and even in an older SAS drive Carrier from an Xserve 1,1 (620-4086) which originally was equipped with a 73 GB SAS drive.

In regard to the connection of the SSD to a SAS bay, you should consider to just connect the drive directly to the data/power plug without using any type of enclosure. If you intend to use a 2,5 -> 3,5" adapter enclosure which has its own activity LED, it might happen, that the blue activity LED of the drive module becomes inactive. Also I don't think, that it is neccessary to mount the SSD into the drive module like it was neccessary for hard drives which were rotating at high speeds like 7,200 rpm. One or two srews from the bottom which keep the SSD in position should do the job.

Trim Enabler actually does not recognize, if the drive supports TRIM. I think, that the reason is, that on all Intel Xserves the drives are connected to a SAS controller and not to a SATA controller. I don't think, that this is really a problem, because all modern SSDs have their own system of garbage collection.

My Xserve 3,1 booted from the Kingston SSD into OS X 10.10 without any problem from both SAS drive modules I mentioned above.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test tested the SSD in a SAS drive module with 140 MBps (write) and 230 MBps (read).

IMO that was already quite OK for that SSD type connected to a 3 Gbps controller.

Perhaps this helps some of you guys to speed up your Xserves.

For the record: Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD (SSC-D0064SC-2100) working well in SATA drive carrier. But info about SAS drives carrier is great!