At my college we're upgrading an Xserve G5 (RackMac3,1) to be a file server for some courses. Currently it has one sled with a 75GB drive. Obviously, this isn't enough.
I've tried some Googling on this matter and I'm hearing a ton of different stuff - custom firmware, size issues, etc. So, for anyone who knows, what's the actual lowdown on this machine. We want to put in three 2TB drives using three standard sleds, replaced with third-party drives. Is this possible?
We went ahead and purchased two Hitachi Deskstar 2TB drives, model identifier HDS722020ALA330. They have a jumper on the back. It's undocumented, but I believe it forces the drive in SATA150 mode.
I put each drive in a USB-SATA interface and formatted them with my MacBook, Apple Partition Map, HFS+ Journaling. I stuck one drive in, gave it a minute to figure out what's going on, and the drive showed up on the desktop and in server monitor as 1.82TB, due to the difference between tebibytes and terabytes.
It seems to be working perfectly. shrug
You can swap out the drives from their caddies (standard procedure on most servers) and put in 2TB drives (might need jumpers as outlined previously, not a speed issue but a standards issue, I believe). You can install 3TB drives, but without a new sata/raid contoller, they will show as 2.2TB only.
Apple only support their Apple Drive Modules (caddies with drives installed) but most off the shelf SATA drives will work. You can get several third party PCI-X HBAs and re-route the sata cabling from the onboard ports to the HBA to support 3TB+ hard drives. Another alternative is external enclosures - USB, Firewire, SCSI, FibreChannel, eSATA etc. For SCSI, eSata or Fibre Channel you will need to buy a PCI/PCI-X card.
I can only testify that my Powermac G5 (dual) correctly support, use and format a 1TB disk (either GUID or APM, 10.5.8). But hear this: for my intel Xserve last gen, I bought one of these new 3TB disks; it works fine when it's in the USB enclosure, but when I opened and insert into an empty sled in the Xserve and it's recognized as a 2.2TB disk! So be careful and borrow a disk before buying.
I installed two 2TB WD RE4 drives in a 2x2Ghz XServe G5 (RackMac 3,1)
I purchased some second hand 80GB drive modules, swapped over the drives, and used the jumpers to set them to SATA 1500 mode. Then they worked.
Without the jumpers being set they did not work.
Previously I had 2 1.5TB (RE3?) drives in the system, and they worked fine too. No jumpering iirc
I expect 3TB HDs will not work optimally, and you will only see 2.2TB. Pitty... this server is still rock solid and does everything we need.
You won't be able to drop in more than 500Gb drives into that G5. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1219
Can't you install or upgrade the RAID interface and install an array of hard disks to suit your needs?
This should bypass any hard disk size limits due to older firmware.
The rumours I hear is that Apple's drives have firmware to optimise their use with HFS+. Regular drives are allegedly optimised for Windows environments. However, since we are talking about a fileserver, there's little benefit here.
I regularly swap in larger, stock standard, SATA drives into various Macs, including the Xserves. Pretty common, really. The tray caddies are proprietary, which for a long time was all too common in server hardware across the board (I have caddies for Dells, HPs and IBM servers, some which take SCA-2 or SATA drives which was meant to resolve that very issue, but I digress).
You need to make sure you get the right sled for the right xserve. I think the G5 and Intel trays are physically the same connector, but electrically incompatible. According to Apple there are also differences between the various Intel models. And some drives do have issues with the SATA controller on G5s, or the other way round. Usually, there is a jumper setting to fix this. xlr8yourmac.com often has info on these jumper settings. They used to have an excellent drive compatibility database, but it looks to have died.
So getting back to the question, yeah 2TB drives work. I've not gone larger, but from what I hear the G5 Xserves happily take 3TB+ drives. And thanks to the easily re-routable SATA cables, you can use whatever controller you like. From memory, I think there can be delay booting if the system doesn't detect anything connected to the onboard SATA ports, but that may be resolvable with an Open Firmware setting.
