G5 PCIe (Quad et al), How big HDD?

[Eriamjh1138@DAN]

Tried searching, but really couldn't confirm because what was big in 2010, 2012, etc. may not be the biggest today.

Does anyone know how big is the biggest that a PowerMac 11,x PCI express series can support on its internal SATA1 bus?

I figured 2TB is almost definite, but now, 3-, 4-, and 5+ TB drives are available for a reasonable price (Around $100).

Before I splurge for the sake of massive storage, can anyone answer how big is the biggest and what works without jumping through hoops? Much appreciated.

Bonus Question: I could test this myself, but since I have your attention: Which drive is mounted in FW Target Disk Mode in leopard on the aforementioned machines? Upper Bay, Lower, or both? I'm assuming all partitions of whichever drives will be visible on the attached Mac... or does the attached device matter?

Thanks!

 

[bunnspecial]

With G5s, both the HDDs will be visible.

2TB is the limit for an APM partition. I've never tried splitting up a larger drive to smaller than 2TB partitions-someone like @Intell would probably know.

 

[eyoungren]

Tried searching, but really couldn't confirm because what was big in 2010, 2012, etc. may not be the biggest today.

Does anyone know how big is the biggest that a PowerMac 11,x PCI express series can support on its internal SATA1 bus?

I figured 2TB is almost definite, but now, 3-, 4-, and 5+ TB drives are available for a reasonable price (Around $100).

Before I splurge for the sake of massive storage, can anyone answer how big is the biggest and what works without jumping through hoops? Much appreciated.

Bonus Question: I could test this myself, but since I have your attention: Which drive is mounted in FW Target Disk Mode in leopard on the aforementioned machines? Upper Bay, Lower, or both? I'm assuming all partitions of whichever drives will be visible on the attached Mac... or does the attached device matter?

Thanks!

With G5s, both the HDDs will be visible.

2TB is the limit for an APM partition. I've never tried splitting up a larger drive to smaller than 2TB partitions-someone like @Intell would probably know.

I have a 4TB Western Digital SATA III hard drive in my PowerMac G5. It's an Enterprise drive. I had to jumper it down and format it as GUID but my G5 reads the entire 4TB in one partition.

It's my fastest hard drive. Lucky for me, my G5 seems to like Western Digital drives as that's my brand.



Here's what the drive looks like.

 

[Eriamjh1138@DAN]

(Two Replies up): Thanks. I noticed the 2TB limit also on the Wikipedia entry. I remember when Macs when from HFS to HFS+ and how it allowed them to go from a 2GB limit to (what was probably) the 2TB limit, which was unimagined at the time (1998). The block size on a 2GB drive was like 2kB and it became much smaller, allowing less "waste" when there were many small files.

The 512kB block size is 256x larger than 2kB, but nothing by today's standard of TB-rated drives. Does APM actually increase the block size on bigger drives or will it just crash? I guess I may have to buy a 3-4TB drive to find out. If it doesn't work, I can always put it in my Intel iMac from 2013.

(Above Reply) Since you formatted it as GUID, you can't boot it, correct?

 

[eyoungren]

(Two Replies up): Thanks. I noticed the 2TB limit also on the Wikipedia entry. I remember when Macs when from HFS to HFS+ and how it allowed them to go from a 2GB limit to (what was probably) the 2TB limit, which was unimagined at the time (1998). The block size on a 2GB drive was like 2kB and it became much smaller, allowing less "waste" when there were many small files.

The 512kB block size is 256x larger than 2kB, but nothing by today's standard of TB-rated drives. Does APM actually increase the block size on bigger drives or will it just crash? I guess I may have to buy a 3-4TB drive to find out. If it doesn't work, I can always put it in my Intel iMac from 2013.

(Above Reply) Since you formatted it as GUID, you can't boot it, correct?

Correct. But I'm ok with that. This is an Enterprise drive designed for storage and lots of read/writes so that's what I use it for. My boot drive is a WD Black 1TB hard drive so I'm not crimped for space in any way. Further, via a USB dock, I have a 1TB Hitachi drive and a 1TB WD Green drive.

The WD Green is serving as my Time Machine backup for the G5 and one PowerBook G4 and one MBP. The Hitachi is serving as long term storage and work files.

I have a total of 7TB to work with.

 

[bunnspecial]

Erik's point about GUID is a good one.

Macs will read MBR and GUID drives, as well as FAT32 formatted drives. You just need APM to boot.

Interestingly enough, despite popular myth and warnings that programs like CCC will give you to the contrary, quite a few Intel Macs will boot off APM drives. I don't know exactly when it was deprecated, but I suspect that it was around the time SL started shipping(Leopard disks are all universal and are APM). Just to prove a point, I've put a Sawtooth in TDM and booted an MBP 4,1 from the HDD in it .

For that matter, at one point I had a storage drive in my Mac Pro at work that was pulled from an old Dell. I'd guess it was either formatted FAT32 or NTSF and MBR. I'd inadvertently dislodged the main boot SSD, and imagine my surprise when I saw an XP desktop loading on my MP.

If your only intent is a storage drive, the ability to live partition GUID drives is a big advantage aside from the greater sizes available.

 

[eyoungren]

Erik's point about GUID is a good one.

I have to credit @LightBulbFun for that.

In trying to get my G5 to boot I discovered that it really didn't like the Hitachi boot drive. So I had to clone it to my WD Black (which the system saw without jumpering).

But it was Lightbulbfun that told me I had to use GUID if I wanted a full partition and that therefore I couldn't boot from that drive. Which again is fine. I'd rather have it as a 4TB storage drive.

 

[Eriamjh1138@DAN]

Thank you, all. I certainly don't need it to boot as I want the SSD to do all the work for that. If I partition it as GUID, I don't have to worry about that limit on this or any future Mac for a long time:

From Wikipedia regarding GPT:

For disks with 512-byte sectors, maximum size is 9.4 ZB (9.4 × 1021 bytes) or 8 ZiB (9,444,732,965,739,290,427,392 bytes, coming from 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (264) sectors × 512 (29) bytes per sector).

I don't think I have to worry about Zeta Byte HDDs for a long time.

I think 4-6TB is what I'll be looking for. It will allow me to back up all my machines and store plenty of stuff.

 

[eyoungren]

Thank you, all. I certainly don't need it to boot as I want the SSD to do all the work for that. If I partition it as GUID, I don't have to worry about that limit on this or any future Mac for a long time:

From Wikipedia regarding GPT:


I don't think I have to worry about Zeta Byte HDDs for a long time.

I think 4-6TB is what I'll be looking for. It will allow me to back up all my machines and store plenty of stuff.

Just be cautious which drive manufacturer you buy. Some of them the G5 will not work with, like my 1TB Hitachi. Some will need to be jumpered, some won't.

I'm biased because I like WD drives, but I would suggest Western Digital. Even so, the drive I have needed to be jumpered before the system recognized it.

 

[Eriamjh1138@DAN]

Do all manufacturers support forcing SATA1 via jumpers or is it hit and miss? I'm well aware of the issue with SATA3 SSDs not working.

 

[eyoungren]

Do all manufacturers support forcing SATA1 via jumpers or is it hit and miss? I'm well aware of the issue with SATA3 SSDs not working.

Not sure. My Hitachi had two jumper looking like pins so I tried both and it didn't work.

But the WD drives came with a row of 4 (2 pins each) so I was able to jumper it.

I get about 150mb per second with the Enterprise drive and about 80mb per second with the WD Black.

 

[Eriamjh1138@DAN]

Understood. I'll try to find something with a proven track record in our G5s.

 

[Mileham]

I put a 5TB Toshiba drive (that I got from OWC) in my G5 and it was recognized as 4.5TB, without any modifications (GUID-formatted in a MacPro). Perhaps there is some tweak to get it to 5TB but it did show up in Disk Utility; frankly I was surprised.

 

[Surrat]

I remember reading that APM starts to get data location errors after 2.2TB, and that any drive larger than that, can get corrupted.

If you want a drive larger than 2TB, please use GUID, it wont be bootable, but a G5 can use it as storage.

 

[reukiodo]

I remember reading that APM starts to get data location errors after 2.2TB, and that any drive larger than that, can get corrupted.

If you want a drive larger than 2TB, please use GUID, it wont be bootable, but a G5 can use it as storage.

There was another discussion about hard drive size:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/g5-quad-max-hd-size-and-interface-speed.1354511/

A 2+TB drive (at least WD60EFRX) can be formatted with APM, and is bootable, at least with 10.5.8 Server. I haven't yet tried with 10.4.11 or regular 10.5.8.

And rawweb discovered that GUID is actually bootable at least in the last generation of G5s. I've validated this with a WD 320GB laptop drive using rawweb's method.

This is the first I've heard of the 2.2TB+ corruption. I think I can test this the next time I have a 2+TB drive in my G5. Do you know if this is for the boot drive only or any APM-formatted drive?