Can my older Mac Pro 1,1 run a 3TB internal hard drive?

Question

Can my older Mac Pro 1,1 run a 3TB internal hard drive?

Hi fellow Mac people,

I've got an older Mac Pro 1,1 (bought in 2008), and I'm about to upgrade the 250 GB main HD that came with the machine to a 3TB Western Digital Caviar Black. My various bits of music software - Logic, NI things, Finale - are running slowly these days due the main drive being almost full now. I have two main questions:

1. Will the older Mac Pro's work with a HD that is bigger than 2TB?

2. I'm going to upgrade to a new Mac Pro in about twelve months. Will these new Mac Pro's also work okay with a 3TB HD? The Apple Store people told me that they can only recommend that I stick with 2TB HD's, which seems pretty **** limiting these days!

Thanks a lot for your help.

Cheers

ANDREW

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Mar 14, 2013 5:24 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

japamac

Level 7

24,400 points

Mar 14, 2013 5:45 PM in response to Phantom Dog Music

1- Yes.

2- The only limitation in size is if you use APM when formatting and partitioning a drive.

APM limits a drive to 2.2 TB.

If one uses GPT (as should be with Intel Macs) there isn't a limit.

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Answer 2

Mar 14, 2013 5:52 PM in response to Phantom Dog Music

The folks at the Apple store can only recommend what Apple has exhaustively tested, and Apple has not tested drives that large.

But Readers here can assure you they work fine (unless you are using the Apple RAID card, whch limits you to the first 2.2TB).

Many Mac Pro users think their Mac needs faster processors, only to discover the slowness is caused by a Hard Drive "Traffic Jam".

I suggest you not remove your original drive, but intead use it as a stripped-down "Boot Drive", with only System, Library, Applications, and the hidden unix files including Paging/Swap.

When Users files are moved off to a different drive, there is less competition for the Boot Drive, and the system speeds up. With Source on one drive and Destination on a different drive, it speeds up a bit more.

http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/

Japamac's Blog: make space for performance -- Moving the Home Folder

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