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WD1002FAEX not working in powermac G5

Davy.Shalom

Davy.Shalom

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 23, 2008
465
1
I have a powermac G5 dual 2.3 from 2005. I just bought a Western Digital 1 TB drive and tried to get it running in the second drive slot of my powermac. I've narrowed it down to this:

-The drive just isn't compatible with mac
-It needs to be pre formatted on a different computer

It's not my sata connector or power connector because I connected another hard drive to the mac in that slot and it works fine. Also, I plugged the drive itself into a pc and it asked me if I wanted to format it for FAT32 or NTFS. So it's not the drive. I plugged it back into the mac and looked in disk utility and nothing showed up. I decided maybe it would show up if I formatted it for FAT32. It didn't.

What should I do?
 
Nameci

Nameci

macrumors 68000
Oct 29, 2010
1,944
12
The Philippines...
Your powermac supports SATA 1.5GBps, probably your WD 1TB is SATA 6Gbps or SATA 3. There are jumper settings to downgrade it to SATA I.

Google is your friend.
 
adcx64

adcx64

macrumors 65816
Nov 17, 2008
1,270
124
Philadelphia
Hopefully, you bought that drive for capacity, not speed, like Nameci said, you cannot achieve the full speed of that drive due to your PM only having SATA 1.5Gbps.
 
Tucom

Tucom

Cancelled
Jul 29, 2006
1,252
310
It's possible to RAID0 or get a Sata II or I think even SATA III bus for the PCIe macs though, no? If so, that'd easily give these later 2005 G5 machines more than enough SATA 6Gbs bandwidth.
 
zen.state

zen.state

macrumors 68020
Mar 13, 2005
2,181
8
I have the exact same drive in my G4 tower on a SATA 1 PCI card. It's a SATA 3 drive and needs to be jumpered down to SATA 2 to work on your or any SATA 1 bus.


adcx64 said:
Hopefully, you bought that drive for capacity, not speed, like Nameci said, you cannot achieve the full speed of that drive due to your PM only having SATA 1.5Gbps.
Click to expand...

These WD Black drives can only go 10-25MB faster than SATA 1 anyway so it isn't really holding them back. Top sustained speed for them even on SATA 3 is maybe 170-180MB/sec. They are the fastest 7200rpm drive on the market so you need to get a good SSD or a 10-15,000 rpm magnetic to really take advantage of SATA 2 or 3.

On my G4 with the PCI SATA 1 card though I get about 76MB/sec bandwidth because it's only standard 33mhz PCI.
 
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