[d_oob]

Just purchased a Seagate 200 gig to replace my existing external 80 gig cuda.
Problem here is that my system (G4 dual 867) can only see 133 gigs over firewire.
Booted up in both 10.3 and 10.2.8

Any one know how to fix this?

Thanks for any help

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by d_oob:
Just purchased a Seagate 200 gig to replace my existing external 80 gig cuda.
Problem here is that my system (G4 dual 867) can only see 133 gigs over firewire.
Booted up in both 10.3 and 10.2.8

Any one know how to fix this?

Thanks for any help

The problem is not the drive, it's the firewire bridge chip in the case. Older ATA chips (ATA/100) only support 132 GB drives because of addressing. You need a newer Firewire case for the larger drive.

[villalobos]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
The problem is not the drive, it's the firewire bridge chip in the case. Older ATA chips (ATA/100) only support 132 GB drives because of addressing. You need a newer Firewire case for the larger drive.

Or an internal PCI ATA Card I believe.

villa

[d_oob]

Thanks for the info on what i need to remedy the problem. Because I will need
the drive to be external I ordered a new case from OWC.

I still think that's kind of a lame limitation. You'd think you can just upgrade
the rom or something. And why is it that the case that I just ordered, only able
to support up to 500 gigs? I guess to keep making money? Why don't they take
into consideration that in about a year the capacity will be doubled?

Thanks

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by d_oob:
I still think that's kind of a lame limitation. You'd think you can just upgrade
the rom or something. And why is it that the case that I just ordered, only able
to support up to 500 gigs? I guess to keep making money? Why don't they take
into consideration that in about a year the capacity will be doubled?

It's really not the case that's the problem, it's the underlying data bus technology. If you want to get around, that and "future-proof" yourself, you would need to get a Serial ATA (SATA) case and hard drive, which has no practical limit to drive sizes.

[d_oob]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
It's really not the case that's the problem, it's the underlying data bus technology. If you want to get around, that and "future-proof" yourself, you would need to get a Serial ATA (SATA) case and hard drive, which has no practical limit to drive sizes.

\

They have those for Firewire cases?

If so i will look into that for future purchases. I thought that was just for internal
PCI upgrades and current G5s.

[Luca Rescigno]

No no no no no.

ATA/66, ATA/100, ATA/133, S-ATA, whatever, that is just a measure of speed and it has nothing to do with whether the bus can recognize drives larger than 130-something GB or not. Generally it's a good indicator of WHEN the bus was manufactured - when ATA/66 was the norm, buses were limited to about 130 GB. What you need is 48-bit addressing, which is present in most ATA/100 and faster ATA buses.

There are ATA/66 buses that support 48-bit addressing, and there are probably a few ATA/100 buses that don't. Arkham is suggesting Serial ATA because if you get that, you're guaranteed to have support for huge drives. But it's not worth the much higher expense. Plus, it's not compatible with P-ATA (parallel ATA, like ATA/100 and so on), so if you got a S-ATA case, you'd have to sell your 200 GB drive and buy a S-ATA drive.

Most external firewire cases support large drives. And since you bought yours from OWC, it really should. If it doesn't, you should contact OWC about it. They're a good company, I'm sure they'll let you do an exchange.

Also, you DON'T need a PCI ATA card. The dual 867, a mirrored drive door machine, has THREE internal ATA buses. One for the optical drive(s), and two for hard drives. So you have internal ATA/100 and ATA/66 buses, both of which support either one or two hard drives at once, and both of which are able to recognize large (>120 GB) hard drives. In fact, the first generation of PowerMac to recognize large drives was the 2002 Quicksilver model. So if you want, you can mount the drive internally while you're waiting for a new case to come in.

Finally, you don't have to worry about cases that say "supports up to 500 GB drive." You'll be able to break 500 GB, I'm sure. The only reason they say that is because the largest single hard drive you can get right now is 500 GB. A couple months ago, the same exact case would have been advertised as supporting up to a 250 GB drive, because that was the largest drive available a few months ago. While I don't know the exact limit of parallel ATA controllers with 48-bit addressing, it's certainly higher than 500 GB.

[d_oob]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
No no no no no.

ATA/66, ATA/100, ATA/133, S-ATA, whatever, that is just a measure of speed and it has nothing to do with whether the bus can recognize drives larger than 130-something GB or not. Generally it's a good indicator of WHEN the bus was manufactured - when ATA/66 was the norm, buses were limited to about 130 GB. What you need is 48-bit addressing, which is present in most ATA/100 and faster ATA buses.

There are ATA/66 buses that support 48-bit addressing, and there are probably a few ATA/100 buses that don't. Arkham is suggesting Serial ATA because if you get that, you're guaranteed to have support for huge drives. But it's not worth the much higher expense. Plus, it's not compatible with P-ATA (parallel ATA, like ATA/100 and so on), so if you got a S-ATA case, you'd have to sell your 200 GB drive and buy a S-ATA drive.

Most external firewire cases support large drives. And since you bought yours from OWC, it really should. If it doesn't, you should contact OWC about it. They're a good company, I'm sure they'll let you do an exchange.

Also, you DON'T need a PCI ATA card. The dual 867, a mirrored drive door machine, has THREE internal ATA buses. One for the optical drive(s), and two for hard drives. So you have internal ATA/100 and ATA/66 buses, both of which support either one or two hard drives at once, and both of which are able to recognize large (>120 GB) hard drives. In fact, the first generation of PowerMac to recognize large drives was the 2002 Quicksilver model. So if you want, you can mount the drive internally while you're waiting for a new case to come in.

Finally, you don't have to worry about cases that say "supports up to 500 GB drive." You'll be able to break 500 GB, I'm sure. The only reason they say that is because the largest single hard drive you can get right now is 500 GB. A couple months ago, the same exact case would have been advertised as supporting up to a 250 GB drive, because that was the largest drive available a few months ago. While I don't know the exact limit of parallel ATA controllers with 48-bit addressing, it's certainly higher than 500 GB.

Thanks for all that info. Yeah there are so many standards out at the same time which makes me wonder why it is a standard. Kind of messy. I'm aware of the ATA connectivity my dual 867 has but the thing is that I need external flexibility. I thought there was SATA connectivity in Firewire cases already. So i was going to keep that in mind for future FW cases. But SATA in a FW even case necessary or even exist? Anyway... The OWC case I got was the Mercury Pro with capacity up to 500GB. I have the same case for my 80Gig but the chip in that one is older so probably only supports up to (150?) I any case, I agree OWC is a wonderful company that sell solid products. I've had no problems with them ever.

[Luca Rescigno]

I've heard some speak of Firewire 800 + SATA bridges, but they're either not available yet, or available but rare and expensive. And since SATA is in no way compatible with that regular ATA drive you bought, you'd have to buy a whole new drive. And most single hard drives rarely even exceed 100 megabytes a second, so SATA's 150 megabyte per second transfer speed really isn't that much of a benefit.

The maximum amount that older ATA connectors can address is about 137 billion bytes (about 128 GB).