Power Mac G5 1.8 GHz Hard Drive Upgrade

You may upgrade to 2 hard drives of up to 2 TB capacity each with no issue or special treatment.

Hard drive selection is important.

Don't buy "green", 5200-5400 RPM drives.

DO buy 3.5" 7200 RPM drives.

Don't buy Seagate drives.

DO buy Hitachi or Western Digital drives.

The only other thing to remember is that with Western Digital SATA 3 drives, you will need to put a jumper on pins 5&6 to work in your G5.

The Hitachi 7K drives don't need a jumper.

Jumper settings...

http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/formatting.cfm

another question comes to mind: what is a jumper?

Available at most PC supply stores:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumper_(computing)

since it has DDR RAM will it be able to work fine with that amount of memory?

Just to be clear, RAM is memory and hard drives are storage capacity. The two are different.

Any amount of RAM that you have installed (the 8GB that you have is great) will work.

The hard drives are independent of the amount of RAM installed (and vice-versa).

4TB is just like a dream come true 😀!

After living with only 160 GB for so long, I imagine it will be quite liberating.

Performance will also improve.

I was adviced by someone who knows nothing about Apple computers...

LOL, great helpers here, be sure to post back with any new questions in a new thread, there are very few unanswered questions as far as I know here! 🙂

I just tried to install a new 3TB internal hard drive into my PowerMac Dual G5/2.0Ghz machine. The internal hard drive connectors, connected to the motherboard and controller there, would not let me format it.

BUT...

I have an eSATA-SATA expansion card in a PCI slot. I connected the 3TB drive to that, and total success!!! So there *is* a workaround to the motherboard's 2TB hard drive limit.

So there *is* a workaround to the motherboard's 2TB hard drive limit.

Partitioning the drive so that no partition is larger than 2.2 TB is the way to use the drive in the native bays.

Tried that. It did not work. Tried it again three times. Did not work three more times. Did you somehow manage to get the partitioning trick to work for your system?

Likely drive dependant.

What drive did you use?

In order for the drive to be BOOTABLE, it will have to be formatted as APM (Apple Partition Map).

APM does not support AFT (Advanced Format Technology) which is used on all drives over 2 TB xompletely. Misalignments between the logical and physical sectors will occure, and eventually, as the drive fills, data WILL be lost.

Drives over 2 TB will only work if the drive is formatted using GPT (GUID Partition Table), but if you format a drive with GUID on a G5 or any PPC Mac, it will NOT be bootable.

It should be possible to use one 2 TB drive formatted APM to boot from, and a 4 TB drive formatted as GUID to use as data storage only.

Bottom line: even if you get a 3 TB drive that is connected to a PCI card to boot by formatting it as APM you WILL eventually be very sorry you did so.

Just bought two Power Mac G5's to resell one and keep the other. Both have no HDD and I need to know what sort of drives to buy. I dont need massive storage so a 500 or 1Tb drive will do just fine. I thought this machine wasnt able to support more than 160. Anyway, any advice would be great.

It will support upto 2.19 TB drives., here's the list I find for G5 PowerMacs...

http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades.cfm?sort=pop&model=182&type=Internal+Dr ive

The WD drives may need a jumper on pins 5&6 to slow them to SATA 1.5 Gb/s