1st Gen Mac Pro - hard drive capacity?

[toontra]

I've just bought a 1st gen Mac Pro (1,1 A1186) and fully tested it - everything OK. I then proceeded to put in 3 new SATA drives into the empty bays - 2 x 1TB and 1 x 2TB - making 4.25TB in total.

I'm now getting various sorts of weird behaviour - slow booting & shutting down, certain volumes disappearing and reappearing in the finder, and even full-blast fans and flashing power light. The 2TB drive is partitioned into 3 volumes, and this is the one that seems to be giving all the problems.

I now understand that Apple stated a 2TB total limit on these machines on launch. Is there any way around this?

 

[Transporteur]

I now understand that Apple stated a 2TB total limit on these machines on launch. Is there any way around this?

AFAIK that limit was because the biggest drives around 2006 were 500GB, which results in a total storage capacity of 2TB.

You can search the Apple forums, there are numerous people with 8TB in a 1.1 Mac Pro.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

It sounds more likely that your 2TB drive is faulty. The 1,1 Mac Pro can easily handle any drives you throw at it. If you wanted to you could have 6 2TB drives in it (two in the optical drive bays). I had five drives in mine, ranging in size from 300GB up to 1.5TB. I can't remember what the max was though since I've since replaced several of the drives in my new machine with 1.5 and 2TB ones.

Even if the drive is new it could still be faulty. I got a 1.5TB drive delivered a few weeks ago and it was DOA. Still need to get round to getting it replaced.

 

[toontra]

Ah. So there's no problem with the SATA bus capacity then? Could be I just have a dud 2TB drive.

EDIT: Cross post with above!

 

[SmilesLots]

It sounds more likely that your 2TB drive is faulty. The 1,1 Mac Pro can easily handle any drives you throw at it. If you wanted to you could have 6 2TB drives in it (two in the optical drive bays). I had five drives in mine, ranging in size from 300GB up to 1.5TB. I can't remember what the max was though since I've since replaced several of the drives in my new machine with 1.5 and 2TB ones.

Even if the drive is new it could still be faulty. I got a 1.5TB drive delivered a few weeks ago and it was DOA. Still need to get round to getting it replaced.

I agree that his 2tb drive may be defective, I have two 2 tb drives raided into a 4 tb drive and it works no problem. Two other drives and 2 SSD's complete the picture.

 

[toontra]

Thanks everyone. The 2TB drive is going back to WD sometime soon!