New SATA II Hard Drive Install Power G5

Boot into Open Firmware and reset-nvram. Then try.
(command + option + of)

All SATA drives are "0" (master) as there is one drive per channel/cable (unless you get into Port Multiplier controllers and burly).

You can use Disk utility Restore to copy everything over.

PowerMacs don't support SATA II drives out of the box. I just bought a seagate SATA II drive and had to jumper it to manually downgrade it to SATA 1.5 from its standard 3.0. You also need to make sure that SSC is disabled, since Macs can't handle that either.

Jeff,
I also just bought a SATA II internal drive -- 300GB Seagate -- and my G5 dual 2.0 doesn't doesn't place it on the desktop. The disk utility sees it, but I can't initialize it or anything. You said the G5s don't support SATA II drives, so that may be my problem. Can you please share what the jumper set up is? And what do you mean by "disabling SSC?" Thanks.

Okay, I get to answer my own question. My new SATA II drive now works peachy. All I did was erase the thing from inside the Disk Utility. Named it. And voila! There she sits on the desktop. Same as it ever was. Just like Plug n' Play is supposed to work on a Mac. Just that the manufacturer or the reseller should provide some finishing hints in the installation, like use Disc Utility to erase the darn thing and have it show up. Oh well, maybe Other World Computing or Seagate reads these posts, too.
David

To say or use a 'blanket statement' like "G5's don't support SATA II (2.5 features) is rather 'broad' when you look at what is actually happening.

And the SATA features that one vendor implements may differ from another, even when seemingly the same.

Barracuda 7200.9's with firmware earlier than "xyz" had SSC enabled by default and could only be disabled on PCs. Today, and with later firmware, Seagate has stopped shipping .9 series with SSC. (And now there is the .10 series about to come out already).

The original WD Raptor was actually not 'native' SATA drive (it was after all November 2003, the G5s were new and SATA was also "just a toddler") used a Marvel bridge chipset (always seems like Marvel tends to have bugs) but it worked, and it included TCQ (Tagged Command Queueing, something that SCSI drives use) while native SATA (for some reason) has adopted NCQ (Native Command Queueing). Some drives like Maxtor DM10/ML III use an extra DSP chip to implement NCQ (not sure how that affects lack of support for NCQ on the host controller, as G5 and even 3rd party SATA controllers seem to lack support yet for NCQ).

Maxtor had trouble when the DM10 250GB first came out (and maybe 300GB) on Macs and PCs. On a PC you could use their utility to recertify the drive, with a Mac, you had to return it. I call that one "early field testing, revision 1-itis."

Hitachi was actually the first to implement SSC and run into trouble and back-off implementing, but there were some 7K250s and 7K400s out there that were trouble with native G5 and SeriTek-based controllers (but SSC did not affect Sonnet's own controllers, but those aren't bootable).

WD. The 400GB Caviar models were trouble.

So you do need a spreadsheet, you are faced with a 'decision tree' when looking for drives. mostly, if you are an early adopter of new drives. Often if you wait 3 months (let others do the field beta) and let the firmware and model revision "mature" you can avoid those problems.

Places that often have good information on what works or not that I have found would be:
www.xlr8yourmac.com
www.barefeats.com
www.macgurus.com
www.macintouch.com
www.macfixit.com
- and others that I just don't know about but that is just my own web browsing habits. (or just Google and hope).

Every vendor has information on jumpers, if there are any. WD's web page and instructions are some of the hardest to decipher and fathom. Especially when the same jumper means different things, depending on if it was factory set or not. (So much for the 'SATA drives don't use or require jumper settings" I guess, too...)

WD 10K Raptor makes a great and fast drive.
Hitachi T7K250 and 7K500 seem to be excellent and reliable and hassle free.
Maxtor 300GB were the first with 16MB cache and good, low cost and perform well.
(And often used in AMUG tests and reviews).

Well, it is indeed a jungle out there. Thanks for all the info on drives. I guess Seagate has spent some time ensuring compatibility between the G5 and the new SATA II drives because my new drive is still there on the desktop the next day. I will say that so far, I have had good luck with Other World Computing as a vendor. They probably do their own compatibility testing since they also market their own storage systems with major brands discs inside. Their 650GB mini Firewire array I bought for $400 and used for 10bit uncompressed video editing worked just fine on the first project. But one is well advised to research before trying to augment systems, so thanks also for the information site referrals.

... does seem that Seagate didn't learn from Hitachi on the SSC issue though... and their Barracuda.10 is being reported as "racket of noise" by some on StorageReview forum (another good place).

Without knowing what vendors are doing, without engineering samples to base chips on, or drives to test with new chips... the cat chases its own tail in a Catch-22. I was very surprised when the G5s came out that Apple jumped on the SATA bandwagon as an "early adopter" in this case.

The transition of SCSI to LVD has a few hiccups and bumps in the road, and everyone had their own learning experience, the Ultrastar, Cheetah and Atlas 9GB 10K drives and compatibility with the UW/U2 68-pin controllers available. History repeats itself, sometimes. 🙂