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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Mac Desktops > Which Hard Drive for a Power Mac G5.?

Which Hard Drive for a Power Mac G5.?
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angelmb
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Sep 12, 2014, 02:15 AM
 
Power Mac G5 Dual Core 2.3 GHz Late 2005, (PowerMac 11,2)

It seems to me this G5 takes the same hard drives than my Mac Pro 1,1 (Serial ATA), so I could buy a SATA 1.5 hard drive, if I am able to find one, install it on the G5 and presto. Is it as easy as it seems.?

Would the Power Mac G5 support newer SATA 2 & 3 hard drives.? My concern is neither the speed nor the size of the drive (I recall the max. size drive being 2 TB and I don’t even need that much space) but to get it working with no issues just in case SATA 1.5 hard drives are not longer available in the market.

Otherwise I guess I could swap one of the SATA 1.5 hard drives from my Mac Pro 1,1 and buy a new drive for the Mac Pro. Would the Mac Pro be more friendly with SATA 2&3 hard drives or the difference here is just the Mac Pro going beyond the 2 TB limit of the G5’s Apple Partition Map.?

Thanks.
     
reader50
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Sep 12, 2014, 03:28 AM
 
Later SATA drives will work fine. I haven't tried an advanced-format type yet (4,096-byte blocks) so can't be certain of those. All the regular 512-byte block drives will work for sure.

If you want to boot from the drive, you are limited to Apple Partition Map, which tops out at 2 TB. You can format a larger drive GUID and use it as a data drive, you just can't boot from that config. Apple never released a firmware update to add GUID booting.
     
angelmb  (op)
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Sep 12, 2014, 04:33 AM
 
Glad to read that.

Thank you reader50.
     
P
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Sep 12, 2014, 05:40 AM
 
Advanced format drives work fine if you take care to figure out the jumper setting. There is a jumper for compatibility with older Windows versions, and that should not be set.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
   
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