Problems with Dual G5 and Maxtor 120G SATA

ucaboys · October 9, 2003 11:04AM

I just bought a Maxtor SATA 120Gb drive, and its causing the system to hang, I can partition it and format the drive, but I´m seeing a lot of beachballs cursors.

I´ve read that othe people are having problems with user installed drives, is there a solution??

I´ve seen this problem listed with other SATA drives in the apple support forums, there is a post where some one called apple Care and got their Drive working, but he can´t remeber what he did to make it work correctly...

Regards,

Luis

kraig911 · October 9, 2003 12:58PM

make sure the drive is set to cable select? at least thats what it says in my manual.... I havn't installed another one in mine yet.

ucaboys · October 9, 2003 3:33PM

Where in the manual does it say that it should be "jumpered" to cable-select, I must have missed that page, could you be so kind and tell me the page number, please. I'm taking about a brand new Dual G5 and an also brand new Maxtor SATA 120G hard drive

The hard drive doesn't even have jumpers, it has one jumper that covers one pin only, I understand that no real configuration is necesary in this type pf drives.

Regards.

Luis

eugene · October 9, 2003 3:58PM

S-ATA drives don't require jumpers. For now, you can only install one drive per channel anyway, and even in the future the drives will auto-detect their location on the chain.

kraig911 · October 9, 2003 10:30PM

I will do it when I get to work tomorrow. seriously its in the manual right before about putting in a airport card or installing ram. I haven't installed anything in ours yet except the airport and I happened to glance over it. I said like to make sure you do it or something.

kraig911 · October 10, 2003 8:25AM

hey Eugene is right, I checked the manual, and that was about installing another optical drive... not another SATA drive. Have you set under energy manager to not let the computer put the hard drives to sleep?

alligator · October 10, 2003 12:26PM

I installed the same thing, and mine has worked perfectly from day 1 with absolutely NO configuration necessary. What gives with yours?

ucaboys · October 10, 2003 3:47PM

the drive it self wakes up from sleep just fine. I'm beginig to think that it might be an issue with the drive that came with the machine.

I get the same problem with X.2.8 and with Panther 7B74, whenever I'm working, browsing, etc, suddenly the cursor turns into a beachball and the OS just hangs, sometimes it comes back to life after a few minutes, but most of the time the system requires a hardware reset (holding the power button down for 4 sec.)

Maybe the original drive suffered some damage on its way to my home. I will have to test it under a Windows machine with the Seagate tools. Too bad noone I know has Serial ATA interface cards installed on their systems.

I'm currrently working with only the Maxtor drive, running 10.2.8 and so far I've has no problems, I'll post a new message if that changes. (I hope my post is to confirm that my G5 is doing OK and not otherwise).

What I would like to know is why the Seagate Barracuda ST3160023AS has a jumper ?, when these drives work with out them. In their web page it says it is for factory use only, but I would like to know what it does.

Regards,

Luis

moogs · October 10, 2003 4:59PM

Hey guys, if you want to see a MONSTER SATA drive, check this shizot out:

WD Raptor (10k rpm)

Here's Storage Review's Glowing Praises

My question: I know Apple has set up these funky little snap-in modules for the SATA hard drives now. If you buy a drive from WD or Seagate, do you have to purchase the little doo-hickeys that allow SATA drives to snap into the G5 bays? Or, are the snap thingys a part of the G5 itself?

ucaboys · October 11, 2003 4:16PM

The OEM drive is faulty, I've tried to erase it with Disk Utility , with the options for Zero out the whole drive & the 8 way Random write, and the OEM drives always hangs and doesn't finish.

Too bad I'm in Central America and there is no Apple Store here, does any one here know if could contact apple and have them send over a drive by mail??

Regards

Luis

moogs · October 13, 2003 8:39AM

So should I assume by lack of response that you can buy any drive with a standard SATA interface and just plug it right into a G5 without screwing any do-hickies onto them, etc?

alcimedes · October 13, 2003 9:25AM

when you say it just hangs and doesn't finish, how long are you giving it?

i've had drives in the 150GB+ range take up to 5 days to complete a zero format. unless you've waited a literal week, you haven't given it long enough.

install the OS onto the new drive you bought, boot off the new drive and give the old one a week to zero out. then let us know if it's still not working.

ucaboys · October 13, 2003 9:52AM

Moogs:

Yes any drive with a Serial ATA interface will work straight aout of the box (if the drive is OK).

alcimedes:

When I mentioned that drive hangs, I meant that it makes the Drive utility stall (beach ball and all). I zeroed out the 120G drive and it only took about 2 hours, maybe I´m ignorant but if you have a 160GB drive (that makes about 149G* 1024MB/G = 152576 MB in the drive) with a sustained write speed of about 25B/sec, it should zero the drive in about 100 minutes (roughly 2 hours).

In that whole time I would expect my drive to be making aounds as if it were actually writing something on the disc surface, but it just stays quite after 20 minutes.

With the Maxtor Drive the system doesn´t hang and I feel the OS actually becomes more responsive, so I disconnected my OEM drive and I´m working with the Maxtor one instead.

I´m located in Central America, should I contact Apple Care in the USA (where I bought it) and have them send me a drive??

alcimedes · October 13, 2003 9:57AM

thing is, if a drive is screwed up, they can take a much longer time to zero out than a drive that it working properly.

the 5+ day ones were instances where the drive was basically broken. the zero format fixed them (at least for a year or so) but it took days.

moogs · October 13, 2003 2:12PM

Thanks ucaboys. That's good news... think I'm going to grab that 10k rpm monster from WD and use it as my main drive / use the OEM as primary storage.

ucaboys · October 13, 2003 10:09PM

Zeroing out the drive finished in about 3 hours, now I'm trying to erase it using the 8 way random write option (Panther), but it seems to hang from the start, should I just stick to zeroing out the drive and making my partitions afterwards??

Thanks for all your help.

Regards and best of wishes,

Luis Garcia

alcimedes · October 13, 2003 10:45PM

you can try to partition it, but even the 8 way read/write will likely finish if you give it enough time.

drives are weird like this at times. in any case, if i were you i wouldn't be planning on using this as your main drive. it'll probably faill in the next 6 - 12 months.

ucaboys · October 14, 2003 11:51AM

Thanks everyone, I zeroed out both drives to make sure, each one was ok, The OEM drive is actually stable now, no more beach ball when it´s connected. I don´t remember the drive being so loud, but at least it´s working now.

I did try to erase the drive with the 8 way zero option but it looked like it was going to take forever, so after about 8 hours, I decided to cancel and just zero out the drive before I made 2 partitions.

I don´t know what really happened to the OEM drive, but it seems working now, I will call AppleCare later today to see what they say. But I should probably start saving for a new drive, just as alcimides suggests.

Thanks for all your help

Luis

bjny · October 14, 2003 12:02PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Moogs

Thanks ucaboys. That's good news... think I'm going to grab that 10k rpm monster from WD and use it as my main drive / use the OEM as primary storage.

Storage Review reports on 9/15/03 that Western Digital will ship 2nd generation Raptors in late October/early November with higher capacity, improved seek times and lower noise.

Problems with Dual G5 and Maxtor 120G SATA

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