Allowable GB capacity of internal SATA in Dual 1.8: above 250 GB?

Apple's instructions (for adding a drive) don't mention drives any bigger than 250 GB, but i'd like to add one bigger than that.
I have one 80 GB SATA drive in there now, which, i believe, leaves me one open space for another SATA drive. I'd like to insert a 400GB SATA drive, since it seems it would give me the best compromise on size and cost. but will it be compatible with my machine? can i leave in the 80 GB one? does brand matter? (the cheapest ones out there at 400GB seem to be from western digital. reliable? noisy?) and the 8MB/16MB cache difference: does that matter if i'm mostly working on quite large (600MB) photoshop files?
thank you.

At the time of manufacture 250 GB drives were the largest around so that's what was listed. You can use any size SATA drive at this time. the only drives that have a compatibility issue are the Seagate 7200.9 drives (the 7200.8 and earlier work fine).

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SMART failure on internal SATA drive - Can I recover data or disable SMART?

Hi
One of my internal SAT drives (a Western Digital RE2 500gb drive) appears to be giving up the ghost and is reporting a SMART failure. The drive is mounting and shows that it has 100gb available but I can't access the data held in the missing 400gb.
I've run a TechTool report on it which has come back stating a failure on the following 2 points out of 15 tests:
• Reallocated Sector Counts
• Seek error rate
Appreciate that the drive is on its way out but is there anything i can do do retrieve the 400gb of data on it now before is completely dies? Can SMART be disabled on that drive to allow me to access it?
Any help would be appreciated.
Mark

It's not that SMART is preventing you from accessing it, the drive has had a physical failure. It may be possible to recover some data with a data recovery tool, like [Data Rescue|http://www.prosofteng.com> or [File Salvage|http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1], or you could send it off to a data recovery service, but there are no guarantees. If the data on that drive is not backed up, I'd guess you're about to learn a painful lesson about backups.

Internal sata vs external fw800

Bottom line which is better/ faster, adding a second internal SATA (does it slow the internal buss) or an external FW800?
Specicfically I'm looking at a internal SATA 250GB Barracuda vs. an external LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme
TIA
G5 dual core 2.3 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Go with the internal first.
If you do go external FW, you should pick up a FW card for the computer to give you a second bus and help avoid problems you can run into when using multiple FW devices on one bus.
rh

I need to replace my Apple HDD Toshiba MK5065GSXF Media, can I use any 2,5" internal SATA HDD for this?

Hi guys,
I'm in a situation where my Apple HDD Toshiba MK5065GSXF Media has completely given up on me. I cannot understand why Toshiba is being used anyhow, together with SeaGate these were assured failures back when I did IT. My question however is: can I simply replace it with any 2,5" internal SATA HDD that I'd wish to use? I tend to favour any WD HDD. I'm running my MacBook Pro off an external HDD nowadays, but it's not a useful option as I'd like to use it at school and all that.
I'd really appreciate your answers and/or recommendations
GJ

I really like the HGST Travelstar 7K1000 and it would be a good fit for a 2012 model: 7200rpm, 1TB capacity and SATA III speeds. I have a number of them that I use to clone my internal SSD and have put one inside my MacBook Pro just to see how it performs - top notch!
That's my recommendation - HGST is made by Hitachi and I've always had good luck with Hitachi drives.
Clinton

Internal SATA ports?

I have a 2007 Mac Pro running windows and I know apple did not initialize the two internal SATA ports for adding a Blu-Ray drive, but I am looking at the new Mac Pros and was curious if they turned these ports on in the new machines? It would be nice to not have to run my cable out the back of my computer to plug into an external card.
Any thoughts?
Thanks

If I recall correctly, the 09's have only one free internal Sata port, and it's located in the optical bay. I believe the 08's have two there. I think Maxupgrades has special cabling to allow even more.
I'm not sure this is relevant, but to fit two Sata drives in the optical bay on mine, I took the DVD player out and put it into an esata enclosure from OWC. It works just fine in it.

Cables for 2nd internal SATA HD?

I'm about to buy a 2nd internal SATA drive for use with the build-in internal SATA controller in my Dual G5 Tower (2003).
However, I've heard that many PC component vendors keep prices down by selling hard disks without any "extras" like screws, data cables, and power cables.
I've checked this document:
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/cip/pdf/g5/073-0806.pdf
which tells me that there are screws waiting for the 2nd drive, but it dosn't mention cables.
So, are there a 2nd set of SATA data & power cables already in the PowerMac G5? Or will I have to buy them along with the drive?
Thanks in advance,
./ddd
Dual G5 2.0GHz (2003 PCI-X) Mac OS X (10.4.6) Radeon 9800 (retail)

Retail packaged drives come with hardware ( cables, screws, et al ), bare or OEM drives come as bulk packaged multiples w/o hardware. In most cases there is little differance in pricing ( retail may or may not be pricier ), the hardware include with retail is generally very cheap ( read not the best ) and better avoided.

Mac Pros extra two internal sata ports broken since Leopard 10.5??

I have a Mac Pro and according to xlr8yourmac.com and the newertech website, there are four sata ports for your hard drives PLUS an additional two more sata ports directly on the motherboard. Through a complicated and difficult disassembly, it is possible to dissect your mac pro and install their cable which they sell for about $30, and get at the rear of your mac pro housing connectors for these two internal sata ports. In short, it's nothing more than an extension cable that fits into a neat housing at the back of the mac pro. You can then plug up to two esata drives into those jacks and they are basically hooked into the macpro motherboard. I ordered this cable and it worked splendidly since 10.4.8 and for 10.4.9 without any issue (that I could tell). I was even able to raid them together etc etc. (edit to be clear I mean I had two Lacie 500Gb drives with esata, firewire 800, 400 and USB 2 on them).
When I installed 10.5 it was all broken!! What a disaster. I can't use these drives on the firewire bus (which by the way they work fine on) because I am already tieing up that with other devices and drives. I need these extra two buses, plus they were **** fast before- I guess it's the same bus as the internal drives get.
I have contacted Lacie - no luck - and also newertech, and did so again today, but so far no luck, and apple, no luck and even submitted a feedback request back when we were on 10.5.1 (just released at that time), and no luck. I hoped 10.5.2 would restore this functionality.
I was told Apple do not normally go out of their way to kill unintended functionality but could this be the case on this occasion?

www.xlr8yourmac.com its over my head but...
A Copy of the April 23rd, 2007 news page post is below (in reply to eSATA Extender cables (w/PCI slot bracket) from Newer Tech for use with the 2 unused ports on the Mac Pro motherboard.)
" this may be of some interest for your readers.
From the Intel 631xESB/632xESB I/O Controller Hub data sheet:
"Hot-Plug Operation
Dynamic Hot-Plug (for example, surprise removal) is not supported by the SATA host controller. However, using the PCS register configuration bits and power management flows, a device can be powered down by software, and the port can then be powered off, allowing removal and insertion of a new device. "
(I asked if he knew of any way to do that in OS X.)
the SATA controller does support AHCI mode, which enables hot plugging (same as with the raid southbridges ICH6R - ICH8R which support hot plugging with raid drivers from Intel without Intel assuring this).
But it does not support AHCI if the PATA port is used as in the Mac Pro. And without AHCI there is no way to do hot plugging.
Using a SATA DVD drive may not mean AHCI is used automatically. The controller has to be switched from IDE to AHCI mode. Maybe the Mac Pro does it on startup or some EFI specialist can finds out how to do that.
BTW Tiger can handle an ICH8R in AHCI mode on all SATA ports without a problem.
Kind regards,
Martin S. "
Info/Tips on using Spare SATA Ports with Windows: (from Jan 15th, 2008 news page) This may have come up in the past and I'd forgotten it (don't own a Mac Pro yet) but in reply to a post yesterday (1/15/2008) on the Pioneer SATA Blu-Ray reader/Superdrive combo drive, a reader mentioned the spare SATA ports are not usable in Windows XP at least with the standard drivers with Bootcamp. (Most readers have used the ports in OS X although I've not searched drive db reports for anyone that mentioned using Bootcamp/Windows also. BTW - The spare ports are bootable for OS X use, as noted in this article - although drives are not shown/usable when booted from Windows with standard drivers.)
(Update) Here's a reader mail w/tips on using the spare ports with Windows via a replacement chipset driver install and grub bootloader edit:
" after finding this thread in the onmac forums I finally was able to get my pioneer sata drive to work under bootcamp. Basically you have to do the following:
- Install Win XP and ubuntu linux with a pata dvd drive in XP, change the ide 2680 driver to the intel ahci driver found here (downloadcenter.intel.com) S5000 Based Server AHCI SATA Storage Driver for Windows.
- Boot into ubuntu and change the stage1 file of the grub bootloader to this:
http://www.olofsson.info/grub/stage1
This keeps the mac pro in ahci mode when booting a foreign OS
Now you can boot windows using the linux partition, this will start grub and keep the mac pro in the correct mode
I also installed Refit to make things a little easier but as far as i know using Alt key when booting should work too.
if anyone tries this and has any questions feel free to ask
-Forrest"

Mid-2009 MacBook Pro sees internal SATA hard drive, but will not boot from or format

I inherited a Mid-2009 MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53 GHz model) with a very strange issue.
It first presented itself as not being able to boot from the internal SATA hard drive that came with the computer. Nothing I tried could get it to boot, so I assumed the file system was corrupted beyond repair and booted from a CD to try to format the drive. Disk Utility on the CD would not format the drive, giving me strange error messages like "Unable to write to the last block of the device".
At this point I figured the drive itself must be toast, so I pulled it out and put another known-good SATA hard drive in, booted from CD, and attempted to format. Again, same error messages and an unsuccesful format.
So I had the bright idea of formatting one of the drives in an external enclosure and then putting it in the MBP to see if OS X would even install. No dice. Get a cryptic error message before installation even begins.
So I installed OS X on the drive in the external enclosure and put it in the MBP, and it attempts to boot, but never goes anywhere.
So to sum up, the symptoms I'm seeing:
MacBook Pro CAN see internal SATA hard drives.
MacBook Pro WILL NOT boot from any internal SATA hard drive and cannot format or install OS X to any internal SATA hard drive.
MacBook Pro WILL boot from any CD or external device and seems to work properly otherwise.
At this point I'm thinking it's one of two things: the hard drive ribbon cable or the SATA controller on the logic board.
Since the MacBook Pro seems to work completely fine other than this one issue, and will boot properly from both external devices and the CD (also a SATA device), I'm thinking and hoping that it's just the hard drive ribbon cable. From my searches online, I've heard that this batch of MacBook Pros is known to have issues with the hard drive ribbon cable, but it seems in most cases this manifests itself by the Mac not being able to see a drive at all.
I've done quite a bit of troubleshooting to get to this point, but right now I'm just looking for any feedback at all. Specifically I'd love to know a way I can easily test to see whether it's the logic board or the cable.

UPDATE: An interesting development!
I just tried a third known-good SATA hard drive, one which I believe supports SATA I only (but I'm not sure), and unlike the other drives that the Mac sees but cannot properly interact with, the Mac can't even see this one when I put it inside.
Frustrating as this may be, I believe I'm actually getting closer to a solution since my symptoms now appear to be closely aligned with people having SATA ribbon cable issues.
Onward!

10.5.8 to 10.6 Can I use an internal SATA drive in my MacPro for back up..

10.5.8 to 10.6 Can I use an INTERNAL SATA drive in my MacPro for back up..
or must I use an External hard dive.
I prefer to use an internal for anti "desk-clutter" purposes. I am looking
at a 2TB drive to install into my Mac Pro tower for the purpose of back up
and time machine i guess.
Also.. if doing a clean install of 10.6 how do i restore the backed up apps
without re-registering all of them?

A clone is a functional copy of the original, including the internal links & setting that makes it bootable if the original is. Time Machine will not make a clone of a volume, nor will a Finder copy. You can make a clone with the appropriate settings in the "Restore" tab of Disk Utility but many users find purpose-designed cloning utilities easier & simpler to use. The two most popular of these are SuperDuper! & Carbon Copy Cloner. Both are very reliable, easy to use, & well documented.
I prefer SuperDuper! for reasons that are not important here. However, even if you decide to use CCC, I suggest that you download SuperDuper! just to read the extensive documentation that comes with it.

Internal SATA not working

I got my Mac Mini (2012 base model) a couple of weeks ago and have since upgraded it by replacing the internal hard disk with a Samsung 840 Pro SSD. The upgrade went by without any issues.
However, today when I booted my computer I was greeted by the dreaded "no system disk found" symbol.
I removed the SSD and successfully booted the computer using a USB 3 drive bay. The SSD works fine; however, *any* drive placed in the internal drive bay (including the original 500GB HD) simply is not recognised by the system.
I've had a look round but all connectors seem to be attached securely.
Is there a chance I've damaged the internal SATA cable somehow, or could there be some deeper problem?
Any answers much appreciated!

Unless anyone else comes up with any other ideas, I think that's definitely the cause of the issue. Thanks for the very helpful replies!
This is a little annoying as I was using the 128GB SSD as my main drive. It's not too much of a chore to boot from the disk in the external drive bay, but for the sake of neatness I would have preferred to keep the drive internal. Oh well, I'll have to see about getting a new SATA cable and see if that fixes the problem.

Best Throughput for RAID - Internal SATA vs. PCI RAID Card

Hi, we're upgrading our old server, which has been on an upgraded G4. We put 3 SATA drives in it, connected to a Highpoint 1820a RAID card running RAID 5.
We're moving this to an older G5 1.6 GHz model (2003). It currently has 2 internal SATA drive bays, but I know can be expanded with an adapter kit. It also has just plain PCI slots (not PCI-X or PCIe).
So I'm wondering what would provide better performance (throughput I guess):
• Using the 2 internal bays with a software RAID 1?
• Putting our old Highpoint RAID card in the PCI slot and running RAID 1 or possibly RAID 5 (with another drive)?
I know the RAID card doesn't use the processor for RAID functions, but I think in a RAID 1 it's fairly minimal, correct? I'm mostly wondering if the older basic PCI slot would bet the bottleneck in a fast system compared to the onboard SATA controllers?
THANKS!

Well, we're most concerned with data security and reliability. We're not streaming video or anything else that would demand extreme throughput. The server is mostly serving files to 4-5 users. So I imagine the performance gains would only be noticed when opening/closing files off the server, correct?
And we already own the Highpoint card, which has 8 internal SATA ports, so we'll probably use this. It works fine on PCI bus. So we can run this with 4 drives in either two RAID 1s (boot & files); a RAID 5, or a RAID 10.
We'll probably stick with Western Digital or Seagate 'enterprise' SATA drives, such as the WD RE3.
So, do you think we would see much real-world difference between the different RAID options (RAID 1 software, RAID 1 hardware, RAID 5 hardware, RAID 10 hardware)?
Thanks!

I just used "Erase" via "Find my phone" to erase and rest my MBP. It's caused my MBP to be locked. I entered correct 4 digit PIN and it seemed to accept it, but it won't allow use of the internal drive. Yosemite loaded. Anyone else had same problem?

I just used "Erase" via "Find my phone" to erase and reset my MBP. It's caused my MBP to be locked. I entered correct 4 digit PIN and it seemed to accept it, but it won't allow use of the internal drive. Yosemite loaded. Anyone else had same problem?

Greetings Fraser Alexander,
Erasing your Mac shouldn't harm your internal hard drive but erasing does clear Yosemite and everything else off of it. Are you not able to restore it with your Time Machine backup?
iCloud: Erase your device
If you erase then find your Mac, you can restore the information on the Mac using a Time Machine backup. For more information, see the Apple Support article Recover your entire system. If you set an EFI firmware password on your Mac before it was lost, then erase it and later find it, you may need to take your Mac to an authorized repair center to unlock it before you can use it again.
OS X Yosemite: Recover your entire system
Take care,
Nubz

Firewire or internal sata drive

which is the better drive for recording audio using logic pro 8 on a mac pro intel 2.0 internal sata or firewire, thank you

My experience says that internal SATA definitely is more stable than External firewire.
Besides many other external devices (audio interface for example) also uses the firewire bus.
Also you shouldn't find the cheapest option when buying a hard drive. Your drive is an essential device, and losing data is no fun.

HP Pavililon dv7 Internal sata HD conector lead????

HELP!! Ive got the Pavilion dv7 notebook & would like to make use of the spare HD slot & fit anotha HD.. . Does anyone know where I can obtain an HP internal sata HD conector lead??? Ive tried al my local computer shops & Ebay but to no joy.. . Lee
This question was solved.
View Solution.

This is the only thing that I can come up with.
http://cgi.ebay.com/HP-Pavilion-HDX18-series-SATA-HDD-CONNECTOR-ADAPTER-/260769238506?pt=LH_DefaultD...

Best internal SATA expansion card?

Two quick questions:
1. What is a good (and simple) PCI(e) expansion card to add 4 internal SATA connectors to the mother board? I had been using an Adaptec 1405 SAS-SATA card that doesn't want to work after my recent clean installation. During boot up, the Adaptec BIOS discovers the connected devices (that had been formatted and used with the same card till last Thursday, before the recent OS reinstallation) but the computer can't see them. BTW, I do not have a driver, but according to Adaptec, I do not need it if I do not want to connect boot disks to this card (that I never wanted to do anyway). Any advice?
2.(Not) completely unrelated: Windows 7 64-bit Pro fails restore operations (Error message: 0x80070005 - that's one reason why I had to do a complete reinstallation). My suspicion is BitDefender AV Pro 2011. There are several comments about this problem on the Internet, and not only with BD AV 2011 but with other AV software, also. Windows error message after the failed restore operation also mentions anti virus programs (even if they are disabled during the operation) as possible culprits. Any insight/advice?
Thanks for any comment, Laci.

Hi Bill (and others who could help...),
By the suggestions of this thread, I installed the Areca ARC-1300-4i storage controller a few weeks ago. Easily installed the driver, and everything showed up in the Device Manager, the Disk Management and in (My) Computer. (2x 2 TB HDDs and 2x LG optical drives are connected to it.) No problem with the HDDs, and no problem with reading from the optical drives (or playing movies, etc.).
However, I run into a big problem when I wanted to write (burn) on the optical drives! I was trying out some burner software but nothing seemed to work: Windows Explorer froze and I had to hard reboot the system a few times. I have used "Nero micro" before without any problem to read and write with the Adaptec expansion card (which went bad and I replaced with this Areca card).
I removed all the third party burner software (Revo is an excellent tool!), and tried Windows 7's native burning application: it also messed up Windows Explorer (hard reboot again...). When I connected one of the LG optical drives directly to the mother board's SATA 3.0 Gb/s port (see attachment): voil'a, everything works just fine.
I am contacting the Areca technical support tomorrow, and will report their input. Still, since it might be some deeper problem with the whole system, I would greatly appreciate if anybody would give me any idea what to try - short of reinstalling the operating system (again...) - which might be necessary after the many restore/restart operations during the Adaptec card replacement with the Areca card a few weeks ago.
Thank you,
Laci
P.S.
Adaptec is exchanging the bad Adaptec card with a brand new card (Adaptec 1405 SAS/SATA Controller), may be I will use that card after all...
The attached Intel Matrix Storage Consol shows the situation when one of the optical drive is directly connected to port 5 on the mother board.

Allowable GB capacity of internal SATA in Dual 1.8: above 250 GB?

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