SATA HDD Hot Swap Problem

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SATA HDD Hot Swap Problem

I have a Power Mac G5 with onboard SATA. Running OSX 10.2.

Does this Mac support hot swapping of a SATA HDD?

I have an external drive that I've connected to the SATA port on my MoBo. I unmount the drive and can swap it out of my enclosure with no problem. If I try to put a new drive in the enclosure, It will not show up in disc utility, although it does see that something has been plugged in.

Does anyone know more about hot swap support on the G5?

Thanks
-David

G5, Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Posted on Jun 28, 2006 11:52 AM

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Answer 1

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The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Jun 28, 2006 12:28 PM in response to dsbresnick

FirmTek: SeriTek
Excellent bootable hot-swap controllers.

If you have PCI (not PCI-X, meaning no 100/133MHz PCI slots, and only 4 RAM slots) be aware that your 1.6SP or 1.8SP/DP and some 2.0DP models with 4 RAM slots are limited to only 75MB/sec write speed on any PCI bus, affects even SCSI drives and arrays.

I would look into WD Raptor (74 or 150GB w/ 16MB cache) as an excellent boot drive. Or any Hitachi, though T7K250 (250GB, $110) or 7K500 (500GB, $289) are excellent drives.

I don't think the native SATA ports actually support hot-swap.

Check out http://www.macgurus.com where they do seem to know about SATA technology. Also, http://www.amug.com has excellent reviews that really are in-depth.

Benchmarks: http://www.barefeats.com
Drive reviews and performance: http://www.storagereview.com

G4 MDD 1.25 1.75GB UL3D 15K/10K RAID Mac OS X (10.4.6) SoftRAID 3.5

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Answer 2

mbean

Level 4

1,250 points

Jun 28, 2006 4:50 PM in response to dsbresnick

I have a Power Mac G5 with onboard SATA. Running OSX
10.2.

Does this Mac support hot swapping of a SATA HDD?

I have an external drive that I've connected to the
SATA port on my MoBo. I unmount the drive and can
swap it out of my enclosure with no problem. If I try
to put a new drive in the enclosure, It will not show
up in disc utility, although it does see that
something has been plugged in.

Dear David,
The G5 internal SATA ports do not support hot swap. If you do not go with a SATA host adapter you will need to restart each time you want to change the hard drive on the internal "B" port that you have rigged as an external.

An external SATA host adapter will work much better for you if you have an available PCI slot.

Have fun,

Michael

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