Anyone know what the maximum amount of HD space one can have in the dual 867? I am pretty sure that when i bought this mac i saw apple saying the max space is 520 gig, but on the 2003 line of MDD's it states 720gig, hence my confusion and this question.
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Originally posted by myahmac
they both can have four hd's. but only oone channel is ATA 100, i forgot what the max limit is on a ata 66 channel, i think it is 120. So say it is you have 240 there and two 250's on the 100 bus, that sounds right other people in the know? BTW you could go to pricewatch and get two 320's for 600
Cheers for that m8, i've got 2 300 gig drives in my sights that i plan on putting on the 100bus and raid em, but if the max is 520gig i'll have to bump down a tad and get 2 250gigs. I've searched all over apple and google and can find all the specs i can handle apart from the max gigage of the system, and im pretty sure they've bumped it up on the 2003 line up.
The MDD's (both rev's) have big drive support (i.e. they can recognise all of drives > 137GB). There are reports at xlr8 of MDD867 taking up to 200GB drives with no problems, and other machines of that revision taking 250GB drives with no hassles. None seem to note whether or not there is big drive support on the ATA66 bus (the front one on those machines), although I think there is.
The "up to xxxGB!!!1!" information at Apple is usually based on the maximum drive-sizes available at the time of release of the machine, and isn't usually updated... I wouldn't get too stressed by the putative 520 GB limit. I suspect that you could put more than a terabyte in that machine with no worries.
Fingers crossed!!
this is most common with specs regarding ram. when powerbooks first came out the largest chips were 512MB giving them a 1GB max. when the new 1GB chips came out, the new max was 2GB.
however all old documentation would still list a 1GB max.
i agree that in these cases your best resource is www.xlr8yourmac.com
those guys keep up-to-date lists of all sorts of hardware.
Originally posted by cybermonkey
Cheers for that m8, i've got 2 300 gig drives in my sights that i plan on putting on the 100bus and raid em, ?
out of interest, why are you raiding the drives together? if you're going for a raid stripe for speed, you'll find that doing a software raid on a single ATA channel will result in somewhat disappointing performance (it might be faster, but possibly not), because ata can only push data from one drive on the bus at a time. if that were the case, you should possibly think about buying an ata pci card or putting one drive on the ATA66 bus, so you can dedicate a bus to each drive. Or buy a hardware raid supporting PCI card. Sonnet make some for mac, as do acard. You'd have to be careful that a ATA PCI card actually had big drive support, though. Again, xlr8 is the place to look for reports, instructions, test results etc.
Oh - and you know you can't boot off a standard OS X soft raid? It needs to be a hardware raid for that.
Originally posted by staphbaby
out of interest, why are you raiding the drives together? if you're going for a raid stripe for speed, you'll find that doing a software raid on a single ATA channel will result in somewhat disappointing performance (it might be faster, but possibly not), because ata can only push data from one drive on the bus at a time. if that were the case, you should possibly think about buying an ata pci card or putting one drive on the ATA66 bus, so you can dedicate a bus to each drive. Or buy a hardware raid supporting PCI card. Sonnet make some for mac, as do acard. Again, xlr8 is the place to look for reports, instructions, test results etc.
Oh - and you know you can't boot off a standard OS X soft raid? It needs to be a hardware raid for that.
I know that a proper raid solution will give me better perfromance, i curently have 2 120gb HD raided together of the ata 100 bus, and the speed improvement is very noticeable for an ata solution, though i am looking at a seperate card for raiding. Not quite sure buy your last comment do you mean soft raid as in setting up raid through disk util on the ata channel? If so then i have no problem booting up on OSX.
Cheers for all the replies, im off shopping.
Originally posted by cybermonkey
I know that a proper raid solution will give me better perfromance, i curently have 2 120gb HD raided together of the ata 100 bus, and the speed improvement is very noticeable for an ata solution, though i am looking at a seperate card for raiding. Not quite sure buy your last comment do you mean soft raid as in setting up raid through disk util on the ata channel? If so then i have no problem booting up on OSX.
Yep, that's what I meant. I misread this line in Mac Help:
"In most cases, you cannot use RAID on the startup disk."
Perhaps they were alluding to the fact that repartitioning will erase the disc. Hmm.
Anyway, happy drive buying...
edit: does anyone else think that embarrassed emoticon looks rather angry?
edit2: xlr8 tests confirm you're right about it being faster? although hardware raid is faster, and they did use separate channels for each drive.
i tried searching for a serial ata pci raid card as they exist for the pc but alas adaptec dont do em for the mac so based on that article you found 8) i've gone for the acard ata133 raid and 2 250gigs.
Cheers for the help guys, i'll buy yer a beer sometime.
Originally posted by cybermonkey
Cheers for that second edit, great find and much appreciated.
no problem.
i tried searching for a serial ata pci raid card as they exist for the pc but alas adaptec dont do em for the mac so based on that article you found 8) i've gone for the acard ata133 raid and 2 250gigs.
This may be too late, but Acard just released one for Mac:
AEC-6890M 2-CH SATA RAID Adapter for Mac
Besides its high transfer rate of 150MB/s, AEC-6890M supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 modes and also the large capacity hard drive exceeding 137GB. Being a highly efficient interface in data transfer and backup, AEC-6890M is fit for Macintosh workstations and servers. It can meet your need in storage and data protection
Can't link to it I'm afraid thanks to their crappy site design. The main site is www.acard.com ? you'll find linkage to it in the new products section.
At any rate, I don't think SATA would offer too many performance gains over ATA133. The bandwidth on both is ridiculous. Then again, I've already proven myself fallible.
Hey wow! Acard make a four channel ATA133 Raid 0, 1, 0+1 card now...
Cheers for the help guys, i'll buy yer a beer sometime.
I'll take that up, next time I'm in England (mid-next year?). Bwahahahahaha?
Frankly, at 6:30am the day before my law honours thesis is due - I'm pretty desperate for distractions.