[sra]

I have two old (1st and 2nd generation) XServes, each of which had 4 slots for ATA drive modules (60 or 120 Gb). One of my drives seems to have died, and anyway, 60 or 120 Gb isn't very much these days. Does anyone know whether I can just buy some new drives and replace the old ones in the original modules? If so, what do I have to look for? Of course, a source of new modules would be nice too (I still have three empty slots between the two XServes), but I'm mostly looking to swap new (hopefully bigger) drives for the old ones.

Thanks,

--
Steve Anderson

[mduell]

Yes, you can put bigger ATA (IDE) drives into the trays; any 1" thick ATA6/ATA100/ATA133/IDE/EIDE/etc drive should work but SATA/Serial ATA/SAS drives will not work.

[sra]

I wonder if it's not a little more complicated than that. In particular, MacTracker shows the original XServe hard drive bus as "Ultra ATA/100 (ATA-6) (48 bit LBA)" with ADM compatibility 60, 120, 180 and 250 GB. Teh slot-loading G4 XServe, in contrast, is shown as "Ultra ATA/133 (ATA-7)" with ADM compatibility 60, 120, 180, 250, 400 and 500 GB. My questions:

(a) Are the ADMs that came with these two models different? The modules in which I want to put new drives are ones that I bought with the original model. Can I put a 500 GB ATA-133 drive in one of these and use it with the slot-loading machine?

(b) is the original XServe really limited to 250 GB drives? There are ATA-100 drives with capacities up to 500 GB available, but before I buy one to use with the older XServe, I'd like to be sure it would work. I can't see any reason for the addressing to be limited to 250 GB.

Thanks for (more) help.

[mduell]

There's no real difference between ATA/100 and ATA/133; some manufacturers never bothered to even make ATA/133 drives and just stuck with ATA/100 (somewhat influenced by the introduction of SATA). And since all Xserves support LBA48, any currently available capacity will work fine in them (the drive size limit is at least 32TB each).