How to power extra hard drives and fan G5 2.5 DP

[pixmaniowa]

OK, I have a 2.5ghz G5 DP (PowerMac 7,2)
I want to use it as a Hard Drive farm. With the two drives in it and 4 additional drives and an added fan I should be able to use it in Target Disk mode.
I have a PCI-x SATA controller picked out on amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/RocketRAID-22.../ref=lh_ni_t?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
Here are my questions for the group.
1. Will the computer access the 3TB and 4TB drives I want to use?
2. Where do I pull the power from?
3. Do I have to format the drives in a certain method? Journaled or what?
Thanks for your wisdom in advance.
R

 

[bunnspecial]

The easiest(really only) place to pull power from is to use a Molex splitter off the optical drive power supply.

I can't speak from personal experience, but you should be okay with 3-4TB HDDs provided that you format them HFS+ and GUID. They will not be bootable-your main boot drive needs to be HFS+ and APM, which will limit it to 2TB. GUID drives are completely readable in PPC Macs, however.

 

[poiihy]

That's.... a very very expensive card

The hard drives would be powered by power connectors... You may need a Molex to SATA power adapter(s) for them, and you may need some y-splitters or some other kind of adapter to get more connectors.

 

[Gamer9430]

I am currently using a 3TB drive and it works fine

 

[jbarley]

OK, I have a 2.5ghz G5 DP (PowerMac 7,2)
I want to use it as a Hard Drive farm. With the two drives in it and 4 additional drives and an added fan I should be able to use it in Target Disk mode.
I have a PCI-x SATA controller picked out on amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/RocketRAID-22.../ref=lh_ni_t?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
Here are my questions for the group.
1. Will the computer access the 3TB and 4TB drives I want to use?
2. Where do I pull the power from?
3. Do I have to format the drives in a certain method? Journaled or what?
Thanks for your wisdom in advance.
R

OWC has this slick system for adding 3 extra drives, comes at a with mounting cage and cables at a clearence price of $19, was originally $119.99.

 

[pixmaniowa]

OWC has this slick system for adding 3 extra drives, comes at a with mounting cage and cables at a clearence price of $19, was originally $119.99.

Bought it! Thanks! It is better than what I had which I was having problems fitting in.

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OWC has this slick system for adding 3 extra drives, comes at a with mounting cage and cables at a clearence price of $19, was originally $119.99.

So where am I going to get power? There are no Molex power plugs in this Mac. There are the sata power cables that go into the two stock drives. Do I try to split power off those two to the three new drives? Is there enough power there? Or is there somewhere else on the board to tap power from? There must be somewhere planned to pull the power from or the product purchased would not exist. I may be borrowing trouble as there might be instructions with the rack I just bought. But I sure like to learn from others' experience.
Thanks,
R

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The easiest(really only) place to pull power from is to use a Molex splitter off the optical drive power supply.

I can't speak from personal experience, but you should be okay with 3-4TB HDDs provided that you format them HFS+ and GUID. They will not be bootable-your main boot drive needs to be HFS+ and APM, which will limit it to 2TB. GUID drives are completely readable in PPC Macs, however.

Thanks! Info assimilated!

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That's.... a very very expensive card

The hard drives would be powered by power connectors... You may need a Molex to SATA power adapter(s) for them, and you may need some y-splitters or some other kind of adapter to get more connectors.

The card will be worth it when I start using the external sata connections as well.
I am always expanding my HD Farm. I shoot thousand of 25mb Raw files and they just get bigger when I PS them.

 

[jbarley]

So where am I going to get power? There are no Molex power plugs in this Mac.

I'm sure the cage will come with instructions, but I'd wager a guess they get the power from the back of the optical drive, which in my G5 is an ATA drive.
Here is a link to a webpage showing how to split the molex power connector on the rear of the optical drive. (scroll down 2/3 the page)

 

[pixmaniowa]

Awesome - - Thanks - - Last detail?

I'm sure the cage will come with instructions, but I'd wager a guess they get the power from the back of the optical drive, which in my G5 is an ATA drive.
Here is a link to a webpage showing how to split the molex power connector on the rear of the optical drive. (scroll down 2/3 the page)

You guys are AWESOME!!!! Thank you.
Last question (maybe)
I was planning to use the computer in Target Disk mode. These are basically external drives for my new black Mac Pro.
Will this cut down on heat since I am not running the CPU's?
That's the last detail.

 

[pixmaniowa]

The easiest(really only) place to pull power from is to use a Molex splitter off the optical drive power supply.

I can't speak from personal experience, but you should be okay with 3-4TB HDDs provided that you format them HFS+ and GUID. They will not be bootable-your main boot drive needs to be HFS+ and APM, which will limit it to 2TB. GUID drives are completely readable in PPC Macs, however.

Sorry, I read Molex but did not finish the sentence to "off optical drive." Thanks for the info.

 

[bunnspecial]

It's probably not a great choice for TDM/external storage use, and will use a LOT of power.

First of all, I'm not sure you'll be able to access all the drives in TDM. This was an issues in older ATA based Macs. I'm pretty sure when I had my Xserve G5 booted into TDM, all the volumes mounted, but I'm not sure if those attached to a controller card would work.

Most importantly, in my experience when G5s run in TDM, there effectively is no fan control. What this means is that the fans(all 9 of them) will run at full blast. It's rare for this to happen in normal operation, but will happen when you do something like spend a lot of time in open firmware, single user mode, or TDM. G5s are normally fairly quiet, but when all fans get cranking at full blast they get LOUD. I was running fsck in single user mode on my work G5 a few weeks back, and one of my coworkers kept telling me that my helicopter was about to take off

If you want to use it for remote storage, I'd do it as NAS and connect it to your MacPro via Gigabit Ethernet.

 

[pixmaniowa]

It's probably not a great choice for TDM/external storage use, and will use a LOT of power.

If you want to use it for remote storage, I'd do it as NAS and connect it to your MacPro via Gigabit Ethernet.

OK, I'm flexible. I just want to get rid of my 5 external drives with 5 boxes and 5 power cords etc. I tried a Raid box, which I have for sale by the way, but it used it's own operating system and when one of the drives started having problems which caused some files to corrupt I could not find any way to repair it. I had backups but the only way the disk would be fixed was to reformat it. ME NOT HAPPY!
So how do I do what you are saying?

 

[pixmaniowa]

Actually, I think I understand. I can just set up file sharing and use the old G5 attached to the network. Thanks.

 

[poiihy]

Actually, I think I understand. I can just set up file sharing and use the old G5 attached to the network. Thanks.

Ok. File sharing is very easy. Just go in sharing preferences and turn on file sharing.

You can set this thread as resolved now (Click "Edit" on the first post and "Go Advanced" and change prefix).

Note that G5s use a lot of power and make a lot of heat.