ssd not avalable in osx 10.5.8

Hello, it depends if this SSD is capable of SATA 1.5GGb/s or not, that is the tops a G5 can do.

Occasionally, if you have a true SATA I drive in the top slot, it MAY recognize a SATA II/III drive/SSD in the bottom slot.

I've seen this on the Late 2005 G5s, not sure I've seen it work on earlier ones though.

This is correct.

I have a G5 Quad system. When I tried to install an Intel series 510 120gig ssd, the motherboard could not see it in the top drive slot. Adding a normal hard drive to the bottom slot did not make a difference, nor did booting it from a hard disk in bottom slot and looking for the top slot ssd in finder.

However, putting the ssd in the bottom slot, made it available. I was able to install 10.5 on it without problems. Later I added in a normal hard disk to the top slot, and both work together fine.

I only say this applies on the Quad G5 Powermac, with Intel 120gig series 510 ssd. I have no idea if other drives or G5 versions will behave the same.

I've gotta assume the SATA speed thing is my problem! Which is ridiculous, as SATA should be backwards compatible. But trying to use an ADATA SP600 SSD is an exercise in frustration (like opening my G5 "iSight" iMac wasn't enough).

The strange thing is, it "sorta" works. Writes generally complete quickly. Reads are unusuable at about 1MB/s!!! I experienced all sorts of problems trying to make this work, but I assume the root cause of all of them must be this weird erratic speed thing.

I'll probably get an OWC 3G SSD. OWC claims they work perfectly with an older 1.5G SATA, and they don't require TRIM support from the host.

Ditto. 🙂

A couple things to remember, some newer hard drives are preformatted NTFS or ExFAT. For PowerMacs, you want HFS+ Apple Partition Map partitioning with Disk Utility. Exfat isn't supported for writing until 10.6.4, which PowerMacs don't support.