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shadybirdstan · Mar 7, 2006, 11:18 AM

I'm going to be adding a 2nd hard drive to my dual-G5 tower. I peeked in there previously but don't remember seeing any of the cabling that would be needed to connect a new SATA drive to the machine.

Do I need to buy an SATA hard drive that comes with cabling or did I just overlook the cables that were in the case? If I did overlook can you please point out where I can find them (or even show me an image)?

Many thanks in advance.

harrisjamieh · Mar 7, 2006, 11:54 AM

I *think*, if I remember back to when I opened up the G5 tower I have access to, there are cables in place for a second hard drive in the top right of the tower (looking at it from the side of the case that opens).

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but i seem to remember thinking to myself 'ooo, now thats attention to detail, they have even placed power and SATA connections in exactly the same place, nice and tidy' or something like that...

shadybirdstan · Mar 7, 2006, 12:02 PM

I just popped the side and do see 3 wires that are straight back and seem to go over the current hard drive. Not sure if one of those is what I need and would have power and SATA connection together but I guess I'll find out.

If anybody knows for sure, I'd love to hear it.

///Milien · Mar 7, 2006, 01:25 PM

I had a second drive added to my dual G5 and the cables are already there. All you need is the drive. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86790

Hope that helps.

shadybirdstan · Mar 7, 2006, 01:38 PM

Sure did, it led me to this:

http://www.apple.com/support/powerma...f/storage.html

Just what I need. Thanks.

darcybaston · Mar 8, 2006, 12:29 PM

I added a second drive last night. I used the G5 owner's manual for instructions.

1. Open up the tower (metal cover, inside airflow plastic thing)
2. Take a phillips and unscrew the four hard drive guide things that are left of the drive bays
3. Screw those 4 guides into the new drive.
4. From the top hard drive, unplug the left most adapter and when you pull it out, you'll notice there are two ends. The bottom drive gets the end of it, and the top drive gets the (new to it) middle one.
5. Tucking the power plug that's underneath the bottom drive bay to the left so that it stays out of the way, slide the new hard drive in so that the guides you screwed in slide in the bottom ( ) grooves.
6. Take the power plug you moved to the left and plug it into the middle of the drive.

Don't be misled into thinking that because the power plug at the top that's aiming down that the bottom one has to be rotated 180 degrees it doesn't. The G5 owner's manual has a great picture showing the mirror setup of each of those.

7. Close it up and boot. Once you log in and the desktop appears, the OS will complain that there's a drive it doesn't recognize. Click on 'initialize' and disk utility will open up and off you go.

My DC 2GHz came with a Wester Digital WD1600JS, and the one I added was a Seagate SATA-II 160GB Barracuda drive. I think it may be faster than the WD, but I have to do some testing. XBench results vary too much where one drive leads, than the other. All I know so far is that when I put a fresh install on the Seagate and booted OS X from it, it booted so fast the progress indicator dialog only had a chance to blip real fast before the desktop and dock suddenly appeared. Wow. I've never seen that before! The WD never did that.

darcybaston · Mar 8, 2006, 07:17 PM

I did some testing with XBench. The WD1600JS kept outperforming the Seagate in Random access tests, but not in Sequential. I created a new user account on the WD and set OS X to log into it automatically and did a series of restarts. The WD booted up just as quickly as when the Seagate did it with its fresh OS X install.

So, the drives seem to be pretty similar. The big difference is that the Seagate is extremely quiet. The default hum of the G5 is louder, whereas with the WD, it's the loudest thing (ignoring the noise the DVD drive makes of course hehe).