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Expectations for G5 Gen. 2 ?
- Thread starter lem0nayde
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Speed bumps, usual HD/optical/memory changes, and Rev B fixes will probably be it.
Doubtful there will be too big an improvement in additional stuff, PCI Express is still working through the system (as is PCI-X 2.0) -- unless somebody has seen a AMD 8xxx PCI Express Hypertransport Tunnel announcement.
An actual motherboard level integrated USB bluetooth device... maybe. Might not be cheap enough yet.
I read the whole report on xlr8yourmac and I have to say that this seems like a major design flaw with the 250GB hard drive and not something that Apple is directly responsible.
I have to say that the positioning of the sensor may not have been the best choice here. Even if Apple doesn't put the sensor right next to the drives, at least do enough QA to make sure the thresholds are accurate.
On the other hand, the G5 Drive bay has more air ventilation than nearly every PC desktop box I've ever worked on. In most PC cases, the drives are placed up front with no ventilation in front of them.. and when you put two drives in, they often are about a millimeter away from each other. (this is a generalization of course, there are some PC cases with drives slung low in back of the front air intake, but I've only seen this on high end PC cases.. not the bulk of them)
Even with a slow moving fan, the G5 case move much more air over the drive than you'd see in a *typical* PC.
Granted.. if the assertions are true, it is a failure on Apple's part to not identify this issue before the machines shipped.
It also means that the drives were NOT designed to run in 90% of typical PC installations. That tells me that a) the drives are inherently defective since they should run fine in the majority of PC cases or b) this isn't the issue that it's being made out to be.
BTW, our dual G5 (rev a of course) is pretty much flawless. It does chirp, but it isn't noticable in a typical office and it can be disabled with a command line argument. We've seen ZERO issues with it, aside from a tendency to crash when the clear plastic air shroud was removed and replaced while running (something Apple said to NOT do).. but this was fixed with the firmware update.
We're very happy with rev A.
ffakr-
When you say "chirp" you're referring to the audio noise issue some people complained about right?
Can you post the command line argument and/or a link to where you got it from? Thanks.
When you say "chirp" you're referring to the audio noise issue some people complained about right?
Can you post the command line argument and/or a link to where you got it from? Thanks.
ffakr in reference to the drives there is nothing wrong with them the problem is the sensor is to far away to read the temp thereby the sensor never tells that fan to speed up. so as that drive is hitting what 120 degrees that sensor never see's it because slow air is blown across the sensor. I wouldnt want my harddrive that hot. xlr8your mac said they notified apple but no response. by moving the sensor they got the temp to 105. engineers can screw up just as the next guy.
Here's some info on the chirping issue.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G5/G5_noise_tips.html
It doesn't come out of the speaker.
Thanks, MacBandit. Hopefully those folks frothing at the mouth about these noises came across this info.
In the PC world, back in the early 1990s, hard drives seemed to last for years. These days, they only seem to last a year or two. They are simply baking in most of the PCs sold these days.
I'm so glad I switched. PCs are so sloppily built, it's hard to use the word 'designed' with respect to them.
I said, in my previous post, that Apple should have done more Quality Assurance to make sure the sensor was in the appropriate position, and that it was calibrated properly to keep the drives within their operating range. Apple does screw up on occasion.
The crux of my point, however, was that the G5 case has much better drive air flow even with the fans barely spinning than 90% of PC cases.
From that perspective, I have to imagine that the REAL problem here is that the drive simply runs too hot and that it can't handle that heat. If its failing in G5s, it has to be failing in a typical PC case (the majority of which have zero active cooling for the drive bays). Should Apple have noticed this? probably.. I'd expect them to considering the obvious care given to the design of the G5 tower. Is this ultimately a problem with the Drive? IMHO, yes it is.
In our dual G5, we have the 160GB drive. The drive does get toasty though there is a constant stream of warm air flowing out of that area of the case (from the ventilation). With that Drive, we've had no stability issues, even under considerable load (compiling software tends to create a lot of disk i/o).
Now.. on a slightly different topic.. back to the sensor placement.
The machines with the single drive option ship with the drive in the upper bay (ours did at least). The top of the case is maybe a quarter of an inch above top drive so there isn't a heck of a lot of room between the case shell and the drive for the sensor. On our machine, the case skin above the drive is actually warm to the touch. IMHO, this isn't so much an issue of the sensor being mis-placed as it is an issue of the thresholds requiring adjustment. Our drive seems to be transferring heat to the area of the sensor quite nicely.
There have always been good designs and bad designs, good runs and bad runs. I've had plenty of drives over the years that would die in a month.. and I've seen plenty that are 10 years old and still running.
Seagate had issues about 6-7 years back, we bought Fujitsu and Samsung drives (half a dozen each) that all failed in under 3 months.. that was around 4 years ago...
The IBM deskstars (usually very nice drives) had major issues a year or so ago.
I think that we probably do see more failures now.. the manufacturing process has probably gotten much better, but we are seriously pushing the data densities while demanding high rpm performance. This has always been the case though.. some runs of a drive are bulletproof and some suck.
I don't think it's surprising that the 250GB drives are having issues, not the 160GB drives.
Yeah and the thing with PCs is most people buy cheap ones so of course they will have problems. I would make a bet that if you bought a PC like a Falcon or AlienWare that cost as much as a Mac that they would last.
Funny thing is now Seagate is one of the most dependable and Samsung makes the most durable longest lasting drive on the planet. Granted it's a 5400rpm drive but still. I know this because anyone that knows anything knows that when replacing a Tivo drive you don't put a 7200rpm drive in unless you want it to cook. So you have to do a lot of research and what you find out is that Samsung builds the best 5400rpm drive for continuous use bar none.