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Power Mac Hard Drives

macbaseball

macbaseball

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 27, 2005
987
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Northern California
I was looking at a diagram on apple.com of the Power Mac G5, and I noticed that there were only two hard drive bays. I've read in the past that there could be a maximum of 4 Hard Drives. (Perhaps with some sort of modification) How exactly would I do this
 
The maximum is 2 hard drives without modification.

There are 2 mods that I know of, one is taking the metal drive cage out of a PeeCee case and modifying it so that it bolts to the grille of the G5. Then you get an IDE or SATA PCI card to provide the connections, and extend the power connectors from the optical dive I guess. Fugly.

There is also an expensive replacement for the clear plastic air guide in the G5, which gives mounting room for 2 or 3 drives.

You're better off with external drives.
 
CanadaRAM said:
The maximum is 2 hard drives without modification.

There are 2 mods that I know of, one is taking the metal drive cage out of a PeeCee case and modifying it so that it bolts to the grille of the G5. Then you get an IDE or SATA PCI card to provide the connections, and extend the power connectors from the optical dive I guess. Fugly.

There is also an expensive replacement for the clear plastic air guide in the G5, which gives mounting room for 2 or 3 drives.

You're better off with external drives.
Click to expand...

Ok, thanks. Just how expensive is the clear plastic air guide and could you link to an example. Thanks.
 
wiseguy27 said:
I've seen mods being sold for around $300 or more - they support 3 or more hard drives! Pretty expensive, considering the cheaper prices of hard drives. :eek:

Check http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2490 for their SwiftData products and also http://www.macmod.com

As CanadaRAM said, you'd be better off with external drives if speed is not a major issue for you.
Click to expand...

The problem is that I would like to record video to them and also I have a lack of desk space. I'm fine with space for now, I'm just looking towards the future.

Which one of the three option at Transintl.com would I want and what is the difference between the three?
 
Which one from transintl you would want depends on what you already have. Adding more SATA drives to the Power Mac requires SATA controller cards that would go into PCI slots. If you already have SATA controller cards, then just buy the mod alone. Otherwise you would have to buy the mod and the SATA controller card (the one that they have supports connection of four drives, although there are cards that allow connection of two drives too).

For a similar product, also check G5 Jam - http://www.barefeats.com/hard36.html

Unless you plan on recording HD (uncompressed) video, this does look like an expensive option to expand.
 
CanadaRAM said:
I think it is a bad idea to cram more drives (more thermal output) into the G5 than it was engineered for.

External SATA 2-drive removeable bay option, takes very little desk space. With a couple of spare drive trays and a small stack of 250 or 400 Gb SATA drive mechanisms, you're cooking with virtually unlimited storage.

http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1en2/
Click to expand...

I'm not disagreeing with you (As I don't really know what I'm talking about), but has anyone had a major issues with it. I understand that it wasn't designed to hold the extra hard drives, but of the people who bought it didn't anything terrible happen? Or even better has anyone bought/use any of these kits?
 
I have a stupid question.

If I buy a dual 2.3 GHz G5 with the standard 250GB hard drive installed, can I install another SATA from OWC?

The specification sheet doesn't seem to say it supports it....
 
Not sure if this is obvious or not, but the standard Dual 2.3 comes with 2 hard drive bays, so you can just pop the hard drive in the front bay and have the 250 gig in the back. The mod I was looking at add three more bays, to make a total of 5 hard drive bays.
 
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