[carterx]

I'm now seeing online that Intel Apple Xserves will not use the newly purchased Western Digital WD1001FALS 1.0TB Hard Drive and from what I see online it's Intel Xserves that will not use off the shelf drives. It works in our G5 Xserve but we are looking to replace it with our Intel but we bought two 1TB Hard Drives and seems they will not work.

They are just for storing our lab images on so we did not want to get into buying super expensive HD's from Apple. Is there anyway to get around this.

I see the one we took out of the Xserve which the HD is way too small for our backups says "Apple HDD Firmware" which is what I gather is not allowing us to use the new drives.

Thanks !!!

[besson3c]

Define "not use". Is the drive detected? Can it be formatted? Are you getting any messages in your logs?

[carterx]

The hard drive does not show up at all in DisK Utility or anything. I plugged it into our G5 Xserve and it showed up immediately so I formatted it then placed back into the Intel Xserve and it still does not show. The Hard Drive is fine but it seems Apple installs a firmware on the HD's they sell so they will "work best to their ability or something.

We don't need high RPM drives for this server. The drives house backups or our lab images. We were using 500GB HD's but we need more space so we bought two 1TB drives.

A Hard Drive, Serial ATA, 1 TB, 7200 rpm, 3.5" w/Carrier from Apple is $525 + tax vs. $120 for the same class hard drive from the shop.... except they do not come with a carrier and the firmware.

So rather than $240 for the two drives we bought, to get the same size drives and speed it looks like we need to spend $1100 + Tax from Apple.

[reader50]

From the G5s, did you use the Partition -> Options button to change them to GUID Partition Table? It shouldn't matter, x86 Macs can read all 3 partition table types. But it's easy to check.

[carterx]

I can give that a go tomorrow but I would have thought I would at least be able to see the drive. I know it's because of the Apple firmware Apple puts on their server drives. Wish there was a way around it.

[besson3c]

If there is Apple firmware that blocks detection of certain SATA drives, Apple sucks donkey balls and nobody should buy an XServe. That would really suck.

If you aren't positive about that, you might want to test the HDD controller to see if it will detect a drive that runs fine on the XServe in the same slot, and test the drive itself by seeing if it is detectable in any other PC (doesn't have to be a Mac).

[carterx]

I know the slot/bays work because I can pull the 250gb drives out of the Xserve G5 and put them into the Intel Xserver and they mount right away.

[besson3c]

And how do you know the drive works?

[carterx]

I took both of the newly purchased 1TB drives and tested them in the G5 Xserve, a Mac Pro as well as external SATA drive case.

[reader50]

carterx, did you hotswap the new drives in? It's possible a drive with standard firmware needs a reboot to be seen.

If you are using the Xserve RAID card, this apple support article indicates drive restrictions, without of course explaining why or supplying a workaround.

[carterx]

Well.... been a fun morning in the server room this morning and so far no luck still. I have rebooted this server multiple times trying everything from changing the jumper settings on the HD's trying "PLUS" & "3Gbps" modes and still no luck.

This is definitely due to the drives coming directly from Apple having their very own firmware installed.

[carterx]

Ok so here is a bit more retaining to this from TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Going Deep Inside Xserve Apple Drive Modules about how you can not buy a hard drive off the shelf and plug into an Intel Xserve like you can with a Mac Pro.

This has me very p'd off because now I have to somehow get approval for two hard drives which will cost $1254 vs. $240 for the already purchased 2 drives we already purchased.

According to articles I have found Apple ships "their" drives with a super duper firmware to help better raid drives with the Xserve. I will not be raiding these. I can understand if that was the case.

So Apple wants us to pay an extra $1014 just to have drives with their firmware.

Not happy about this one bit !!!!!!!

[besson3c]

That really sucks if that is true. I mean, really sucks. $1014 for two regular SATA drives of any size is highway robbery. I'd imagine their RAID card is probably the same sort of ripoff?

[carterx]

Ya, I've now tried 4 different drives all being 250GB, 500GB & 1TB and the only ones that have the "Apple HDD Firmware" work.

I have also tried booting from the Leopard & Snow Leopard server disc's and run Disk Utility and still nothing.

[besson3c]

carter: it seems like it would be far more practical for you to look at a NAS or some other storage device at this point. You can literally build a brand new server with enough disks to form a RAID 5 array for less than $1000, if not a NAS.

[carterx]

In my opinion it's dirty ball by Apple to get more money out of ya.

With this I has a faculty member here at work drop off her new MacBook she bought for her son because the logic board will not display video on the screen but will on an external display... but anyways I updated the new laptop and went to transfer the fiels from the old one to the new one..... wait, I can put the old MacBook in FireWire/Target mode but how the hell do I plug it into the new MacBook.... there are only two USB ports !!! .... no FW at all.

So now I'm transferring file to an external HD then transfer to the new MacBook via USB.

As another said it here in the office which honestly.... Apple really did do it..... but Apple "Crippled" the MacBook just enough that if you want need FireWire and the other bonus features you need to buy a MacBook Pro.

Dirty !!!

[carterx]

Has anyone else come into this issue?

I have talked to a couple Apple shops and some have said they use off the shelf drives themselves because Apple drives are too expensive yet no issues like this.

I'm out of ideas to try and trick the server to work.

[besson3c]

carter: are the drives Apple sells SATA or SAS? I just can't get over how pricey those drives are, if we are indeed talking SATA here.

[carterx]

They are all SATA.

This is a snapshjot of the SATA drive that works in the Xserve. You can see where it says "Apple HDD Firmware"

[reader50]

Get a multibay FW800 enclosure (or separate FW800 enclosures) and use standard drives. One truth about drives is they always fill up - you eventually buy bigger drives. At least with an enclosure, you pay through the nose only once.

[carterx]

The issue is that I have 2 x 1TB drives. One for our images and one to backup those images. I would need to external cases. It looks like I'll be keeping the Mac Pro as our server and just update the Server OS and not use our nice and powerful Xserve..... hmmm, maybe I can use it as an Unreal Tournament Server :-)

[carterx]

**UPDATE** -- fixed :-)

For the past number of months I've been running two external 1TB hard drives because the Intel Apple server I have will not read the HD's unless I were to buy them from Apple which is a ridiculous price. Yesterday I order 4 2TB Hard Drives as we needed for some desktops. Just for kicks I installed two of them into the XServe & guess what ..... they work!! :-) I was able to raid the two 2TB drives without an issue. The only thing I can pickup on it that the Hard Drive that came with the Server that has the so call "apple firmware" is Hitachi & the two 2TB drives are also Hitachi. So I'm guessing there is something on these drive for firmware that lets them work.

.

[turtle777]

Well, it's not really a fix, but a lucky break you got.

It seems one should avoid XServes if it's not clear which drives outside of Apple's own recommended work

-t

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Well, it's not really a fix, but a lucky break you got.

It seems one should avoid XServes if it's not clear which drives outside of Apple's own recommended work

-t

I hate to defend Apple, but I've heard that companies like Dell do the same thing. It's bullshit, but I guess that's the price you pay if you want a major manufacturer's label on your server.

I would honestly love to do an in-depth comparison between buying a prebuilt server like an XServe and paying all of these premiums vs. building your own and having spare parts around. The comparison would have to account for the differences in support costs, staffing, the amount of time it would take to get both up and running, etc. and many other variables.

For some people they might value their money over their time, and others might value their time over their money, and to each only to a certain extent. Time is money, but there is already a difference of money involved in the initial expenditure of a machine like the XServe. Some companies have staff around that are "being paid anyway" on salary and perhaps could squeeze in the time needed to do a home build, if there was a clear benefit in doing so. Some IT guys would be totally comfortable with a home build, this would not be a strain on them at all, and in fact could even be a plus to be able to do stuff like swap out a failing drive on their own rather than having to call a phone number and work with somebody on that.

This sort of comparison of course would probably have to entail running something other than OS X unless Hackintosh servers were practical, but... For that matter you could do the same comparison with OS X Server itself

[Waragainstsleep]

That page of information about what Apple claims justifies its ADM pricing is quite fascinating. Much of it sounds plausible but the skeptic in me wants to call bulls**t.

I don't have much hands on experience with swapping ADMs in Intel Xserves, but I did a fair few in Xserve RAIDS and G4 and G5 versions. I own a pair of G4 Xserves myself and I went to great lengths to discover the cheapest way to fill my drive bays up.

Essentially when you take into account all the extra testing and tuning that Apple is charging you for, you should reasonably expect your drive to outlast one that costs 25% as much by quite some time. Sadly, that extra 75% premium gets you absolutely no extra warranty at all from Apple which makes it a complete waste. Secondly, in my experience drives in ADMs are probably more likely to fail than any others I've dealt with. Most of them actually don't fail but the Xserve drive controllers are so damned fussy that you start to wonder if you can trust them to know either way.

I have seen an alarmingly high number of them fail just by being pulled out and reinserted. Some of them went on to give years of service, others had red lights frequently and ultimately had to be replaced.

I had three go in one Xserve RAID during the course of a single repair, just trying to troubleshoot it. So all that testing isn't saving Apple much money either.

Even if it did make the drives more reliable, its still false economy. Any server worth spending 4 times the standard on drives will have a rock solid backup system, so it makes far more sense to just buy four cheaper drives to me.

I have replaced a lot of drives in my time, and what I have learned I stick to rigidly:
It doesn't matter how much you test a hard disk, it will fail. Some fail out of the box, some work beautifully when they are 10 years old and making noises like a tractor rolling down a cliff (and I mean on its roof rather than its wheels).;
No one brand is superior to the others. Its just luck.
From my sales patter: Your new drive WILL fail. If that means you have to buy another one to back up to, well thats just the way it is.
Luckily the older G5s are not fussy about which drives you put in the ADM carrier so I never experienced the issue described here. I'd be curious to know what system profile reports as the Revision of the incompatible drives though.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

That page of information about what Apple claims justifies its ADM pricing is quite fascinating. Much of it sounds plausible but the skeptic in me wants to call bulls**t.

I don't have much hands on experience with swapping ADMs in Intel Xserves, but I did a fair few in Xserve RAIDS and G4 and G5 versions. I own a pair of G4 Xserves myself and I went to great lengths to discover the cheapest way to fill my drive bays up.

Essentially when you take into account all the extra testing and tuning that Apple is charging you for, you should reasonably expect your drive to outlast one that costs 25% as much by quite some time. Sadly, that extra 75% premium gets you absolutely no extra warranty at all from Apple which makes it a complete waste. Secondly, in my experience drives in ADMs are probably more likely to fail than any others I've dealt with. Most of them actually don't fail but the Xserve drive controllers are so damned fussy that you start to wonder if you can trust them to know either way.

I have seen an alarmingly high number of them fail just by being pulled out and reinserted. Some of them went on to give years of service, others had red lights frequently and ultimately had to be replaced.

I had three go in one Xserve RAID during the course of a single repair, just trying to troubleshoot it. So all that testing isn't saving Apple much money either.

Even if it did make the drives more reliable, its still false economy. Any server worth spending 4 times the standard on drives will have a rock solid backup system, so it makes far more sense to just buy four cheaper drives to me.

I have replaced a lot of drives in my time, and what I have learned I stick to rigidly:
It doesn't matter how much you test a hard disk, it will fail. Some fail out of the box, some work beautifully when they are 10 years old and making noises like a tractor rolling down a cliff (and I mean on its roof rather than its wheels).;
No one brand is superior to the others. Its just luck.
From my sales patter: Your new drive WILL fail. If that means you have to buy another one to back up to, well thats just the way it is.
Luckily the older G5s are not fussy about which drives you put in the ADM carrier so I never experienced the issue described here. I'd be curious to know what system profile reports as the Revision of the incompatible drives though.

I agree!

I have seen expensive SCSI/fibre channel disks fail frequently, SAS disks fail, SATA disks fail - they all fail.

I don't buy the argument that Apple has "tested" a particular SATA drive as a justification for a premium. They certainly don't do any more testing than the drive vendor, and even just taking note of which drives fail the most on XServes over whatever frequency given whatever sample this still doesn't offer any particular guarantees.

Build your system around the assumption that a drive will fail. SATA drives are so dirt cheap anyway that I think (leaving the issue of warranty and service contracts aside and whether this sort of scenario is possible) that it would be better to just have spare parts on hand and insert the drive on your own so that it can level with your RAID set - they are hot swappable for this reason, rather than paying out the wazzo for the privilege of calling some number so that an Apple rep can come and do this for you.

[Waragainstsleep]

Another interesting tidbit: As I understand it, the SATA spec means that all SATA drives (not your boot drive maybe) could be hot swappable. Its just that its rarely implemented.

I once looked into the possibility of replicating an ADM carrier (Empty ones were £100 each at the time on eBay). As far as I can tell the only active electronics beyond adapting one connector (SCA80) to another (ATA) was a single small chip which was designed to signal the host machine when you trigger the handle so the OS doesn't whinge when you yank out the drive. Its not crazy to assume there might be a temp sensor in there too, but drives have several of these anyway so I think it would be unnecessary.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Another interesting tidbit: As I understand it, the SATA spec means that all SATA drives (not your boot drive maybe) could be hot swappable. Its just that its rarely implemented.

It's probably rarely implemented because SATA is not intended for server use, SAS is, although the two are similar enough that many motherboards support both.