Upgrade Powermac G5 HDD

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dcrocksdcrocks
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I am looking at replacing the boot drive in my Powermac dual 2ghz desktop. I am looking at the Samsung Spinpoint T 320gb ( HD321KJ ). It is inexpensive, quiet, cool, and low power (certainly comapared to the current seagate 7200.7). But the Powermac only supports SATA 1.5 gb/s whereas the Samsung is SATA II 3.0 gb/s. I know that some SATA II drives can be forced compatible to SATA and Samsung's web site indicates it is true for this drive as well. But it is not clear how that is done and whether it is true with Macs. One manual says you add a jumper and another that you run special software.

I want to keep the price under $100 and the capacity over 150gb with a cooler, quieter machine. Has anyone experience with new Samsung drives in older macs, particularly this one. Or can you recommend a drive to meet my needs.





ps. The machine will be used as a modest web server and won't suffer high demand.

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  • Reply 1 of 1
    futurepastnowfuturepastnow Posts: 1,772member
    All SATA II drives are fully backwards-compatible. Any will work. Some of them have a jumper to force them into SATA 150 mode, but even that is only necessary with certain RAID controllers, so you probably don't have to worry about it.



    Edit: I did some reading and it's actually mainly old VIA southbridges that don't work properly with 3.0Gbps drives. So to repeat: don't worry about the jumper or anything like that. The drive should detect the slower connection and work fine.
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