i have a friend who has recently bought a new internal hard drive for his power mac G5, he dosent really know much about pc's so asked me too have a look at it. I have never worked with a mac and wanted to know what sort of issues i could face and how to over come them?? thanks
PowerMac
Let me add a small bit of advice to japamac's post, which concerns the overmold screws that go into the side of the drive and allow one to securely slide the drive into the lower slot. These screws should still be in the machine in a tab to the left of the drive bay if no second drive has ever been installed. The instructions in the user guide will say to put the overmold screws into the side holes at the front and back of the drive.
I have found that putting the screws in the side holes at the back of the drive and the middle of the drive will make it much easier to extricate the drive from the lower slot, should that be necessary. Stability is not affected.
Yes, you may install two SATA drives of up to 2 TB each without trouble, but with conditions.
7200 RPM SATA rev. 2 drives from Western Digital (Blue and Black) and Hitachi (7K) are plug and play, as are 7200 RPM SATA rev. 3 drives from Hitachi.
SATA rev. 3 drives from Western Digital work fine as long as a jumper is placed on pins 5 and 6 of the drive.
No drive from Seagate is recommended due to a history of firmware conflicts and issues with the G5.
No green or 5200/5400 RPM drive is recommended for internal use in a G5.
SATA rev. 2 SSD drives may be used, but most reports of SATA rev. 3 SSD drives are of failure to communicate with the G5 controller.
SATA rev. 3 SSD drives should not be considered.
Any installed drive needs to be formatted to Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) and must be formatted using the APM partition scheme using Disk Utility of OS X.
Can I ask why neither the (WD?) Green nor 5200/5400 RPM drive "is recommended for internal use in a G5"? Except, perhaps, that they won't work...
I have two 1TB WD Greens (from My Book II, that got two 3TB drives). Idea has been to replace the original 250 gig WD drive that I don't much trust anymore (almost nine years old & in heavy use as the only drive in G5). I'd very much prefer a raid-0 as the internal drive, too. The machine is Power Mac G5 quad (Late 2005) with Tiger (10.4.11). My problem has been such that I'm unable to get the machine to recognise both drives. Only the drive in lower bay is recognised. WD support said, that I must first fill the drives with zeros in order to get rid off of all linux formatting on drives. Done that, couple of times (hope so). Drives are now HFS+ formatted: both have had some OS (OSX/Ubuntu) while I wanted to see that they really work. They also have been used as the second (lower) drive, in addition to the old system drive. No problems - except when both are installed - or rather, non-installed. And no matter which one is in upper or lower bay: it's always only the lower one that is recognised by the install program or disk utility.
Could it be that I've been unable to clear all the "linux code" from the drives? Could it be that the internal battery is dead and therefore pram settings cannot be saved? Or is it just that the Greens won't work in G5?
Sadly Japamac has given up helping here. 😟
Did you try Jumpers on pins 5&6 if the "Greens" have that?
If the drives are not SATA 1.5 Gb/s compatible, then Jumpers are needed, or a real SATA 1.5 Gb/s drive it may work for a faster drive in slot 1 & the real old drive in slot 0.
Thank you for the answer!
No jumpers around. That was my first question after I had replaced the My Book drives. After some queries I came to the conclusion, that they aren't anymore needed. And of course, there's no jumper on the "original" HD (from 2006: not actually the original HD). However, I'm going to ask/buy couple of jumpers when around the local computer store next time.
I can't check the drives right now but I'm quite convinced they're SATA at least 3.0 Gb/s drives (from 2002, I'd remember).
Right. The jumpers (on the pins 5+6) did the trick. Thank you!
Funny, though, that neither the WD nor the Apple tech supprt site simply told to try the jumpers (at least, I didn't noticed such warning), when installing new drives on old hardware like Power Mac: even if the drives do work, there can be data loss or other problems with too fast drive on slower bus+controller hardware. However, a whopping 1.8Tb "raid drive" is now up and working and has accepted the OSX, the apps & the data: the speed is now slightly better than earlier with 1.5Gb database (and faster than running it from external HW drive). Daily backups are now essential - I'm not hugely confident with software base raid.
Once again: Thanks!
OK, good luck & keep us posted as to the outcome please! 🙂
Great to hear, thanks. 🙂
can you have two hard drives installed on a power mac g5
