Will a 2007 Mac Pro recognize a 1TB drive?

[motomike27]

Being new to Mac, I blew it and bought my Mac Pro as a Christmas present only to have them release the "Early 2008" model days after receiving mine. I still love my MP but am I stuck with a max of 3TB instead of the glorious 4TB the new models claim? I've seen mixed reviews with some saying the 1TB works fine while others say it isn't recognized by the 07 models.

My system is currently configured with the following (in the event this matters whether it will recognize the 1TB):

2-dual core 3.0GHz Intel Xeon
4 GB Ram
1-750GB hard drive
Radeon X1900XT
OS X Leopard

Thanks for the help.

 

[Tallest Skil]

64-bit OS X can recognize 16 exabytes of RAM. I think there is a correlation between this and the recognized size of HDDs. For example, older computers could not see hard drives over 128GB in size. With a 64-bit OS, that limit is removed.

Of course, I'm probably completely wrong about that, but at any rate, you can use terabyte drives and will be able to use any drive size for about another century, provided you can find SATA to ???? adaptors.

 

[Makosuke]

The answer is "it's probably fine". ANY Mac Pro should recognize a 1TB drive. I assume you're worried about some drives that apparently misbehaved on the SATA controllers due to particular features they supported (the server-grade WD drives come to mind). A look at the drive compatibility database at xlr8yourmac.com should confirm for any particular model, although as far as I know if you have a PC available to run the company's low-level utilities (or boot your Mac Pro off of an optical disc to do so--should work), you can just switch the particular setting causing the issue.

I've never had one personally, though.

For example, older computers could not see hard drives over 128GB in size. With a 64-bit OS, that limit is removed.

No. The 128GB limitation had to do with the drive controllers and the ATA spec, not the OS being 32 bits. If that were the case, you wouldn't be able to use a drive larger than 4GB, which it obviously isn't. Hell, most versions of XP STILL aren't 64 bit, and pre-10.5 only parts of OSX were.

For that matter, any G5 tower should be fine with 1TB drives. In fact, any computer with SATA onboard PERIOD will--I believe the spec allows up to 144PB (that's petabytes, 1024GB). Heck, even G4 towers built after 2002 support >128GB PATA drives.

 

[carlos700]

Actually 144 petabytes = 150,994,944 gigabytes.