A while back, I posted about how my (now air cooled) Quad refused to "see" a WD Blue 4 TB spinner that I added to it. At the time, I sidestepped the problem vs. fixing it. The boot drive was an older 750 GB Seagate spinner, which had been supplied originally as one of two paired 750 GB HDDs in my 2008 Mac Pro. I had the good luck to find the other half of that pair at about this time, and unable to resist the symmetry, I installed it into the Quad as well, yielding a symmetric set of two 750 GB HDDs.
I never did solve the "don't see the WD Blue spinner" issue.
Today, I solved it, and I want to pass the solution along to all of you for future reference. While this post is all about WD Blue drives, my guess is that the problem, and its solution, are not specific to WD at all, but rather quite generic.
Long story short: the current crop of WD Blue drives are SATA III. The PowerMac Quad is SATA I. Normally, a SATA III drive should "downshift" to SATA I dynamically in a situation like this, but the current WD Blue drives (and I suspect plenty of other manufacturer's drives as well) don't do this anymore... there is not a lot of demand for SATA I these days, and I am guessing that they cost-reduced this functionality out of the product.
HOWEVER, the SATA III -> SATA I functionality is still there, but it is now implemented via a nearly completely undocumented jumper on the drive. There are in fact four jumpers on the drive, all of which are largely undocumented. They do not show up at all in any of the documentation supplied with the drive, nor in anything you can find easily on the web. However, if the right jumper is installed, it shifts the drive from SATA III to SATA I. I discovered this after getting the idea from trolling through the web courtesy of "Mr. Google", followed by an online chat with WD technical support. After following a fairly obscure series of links, I finally came upon some detailed information on the drives and voila! there was the jumper documentation!
For the WD Blue drives in specific, here is the jumper image that tells the story:
The last of these three images is the key one. I installed a jumper between pins 5 and 6, reinstalled the drive and started up my Quad. The erstwhile undetected drive was suddenly there in all its glory. I was able to "see" it, partition it and format it and I am now using it happily.
For other drive manufacturers/types, if your Quad is not "seeing" a SATA III drive (doesn't even show up in Disk Utility), dig around on the web a little bit, looking for a way to configure the drive for SATA I vs. its default SATA III. Once so configured, your Quad will see the drive right away.
One other thought - while this post has been all about "seeing" drives on a Quad, I realize that most people do not have Quads. If you have a G5 of any type at all, and cannot get it to "see" a new SATA III hard drive, my guess is the same solution I applied on my Quad will work as well on your machine. You have nothing to lose by trying it!
I never did solve the "don't see the WD Blue spinner" issue.
Today, I solved it, and I want to pass the solution along to all of you for future reference. While this post is all about WD Blue drives, my guess is that the problem, and its solution, are not specific to WD at all, but rather quite generic.
Long story short: the current crop of WD Blue drives are SATA III. The PowerMac Quad is SATA I. Normally, a SATA III drive should "downshift" to SATA I dynamically in a situation like this, but the current WD Blue drives (and I suspect plenty of other manufacturer's drives as well) don't do this anymore... there is not a lot of demand for SATA I these days, and I am guessing that they cost-reduced this functionality out of the product.
HOWEVER, the SATA III -> SATA I functionality is still there, but it is now implemented via a nearly completely undocumented jumper on the drive. There are in fact four jumpers on the drive, all of which are largely undocumented. They do not show up at all in any of the documentation supplied with the drive, nor in anything you can find easily on the web. However, if the right jumper is installed, it shifts the drive from SATA III to SATA I. I discovered this after getting the idea from trolling through the web courtesy of "Mr. Google", followed by an online chat with WD technical support. After following a fairly obscure series of links, I finally came upon some detailed information on the drives and voila! there was the jumper documentation!
For the WD Blue drives in specific, here is the jumper image that tells the story:
The last of these three images is the key one. I installed a jumper between pins 5 and 6, reinstalled the drive and started up my Quad. The erstwhile undetected drive was suddenly there in all its glory. I was able to "see" it, partition it and format it and I am now using it happily.
For other drive manufacturers/types, if your Quad is not "seeing" a SATA III drive (doesn't even show up in Disk Utility), dig around on the web a little bit, looking for a way to configure the drive for SATA I vs. its default SATA III. Once so configured, your Quad will see the drive right away.
One other thought - while this post has been all about "seeing" drives on a Quad, I realize that most people do not have Quads. If you have a G5 of any type at all, and cannot get it to "see" a new SATA III hard drive, my guess is the same solution I applied on my Quad will work as well on your machine. You have nothing to lose by trying it!
