G5 xserve drive module

I've looked through posts concerning the use of OEM drives. I'm curious, & I've seen conflicting reports. Has anyone been successful putting 750 gig HD's in the G5 xserve drive modules? I found some empty sleds, but I've also seen the claim that the xserve will only accept drives up to 500 gig. Any real life experience out there?

You may of already seen/tried this, but if you do a software update on your Xserve, there was a recent "RAID Admin" update that enabled support for "750GB Xserve RAID Drive Modules".
I do not have any 750GB drives in any Xserve presently (using other machines and ReadyNAS for that)...but I would imagine that the modules do support the drives now based on that update, and other OSX Server updates.
I will be trying that size out soon, but no reason at the present.

Similar Messages

Where to buy a xserve RAID drive module in the UK?

Hi does anyone know anywhere that still sells xserve RAID drive modules for a 2005 RAID
we have 400 GB drives but can use a 500 GB because we have the latest firmware.
If modules are unavailable can I take the failed drive out of the module and replace with a new one.
The current drive is a Hitachi Deskstar HDS724040KLAT80

Just sold our complete xsan setup (42 400Gb modules included) for 2500 euro... (so 60 euro per drive) and that included 4 XServes as well

Finding replacement xServe RAID Drive Modules for sale

I've just started a new IT job and inherited an xServe (snow leopard) and xServe RAID
I'm not an expert on either. I've some experience with OS X Server, but I've never been a full on server admin.
One drive is dead. I believe they're 500GB units in the first six bays.
I also believe this is the most recent xServe RAID hardware. Purchased in 2008 or so.
So, first, where on earth would I buy a replacement?
And assuming that's possible, what are people's suggestions for buying drive modules for the other bays, and replacement parts for the xServe itself (power suppies, etc.).
Thanks!

first of all i don't have experience with proprietary Apple products, but typically i believe you can buy any hard drive so long as the interface is compatible (SATA or SAS for example) and the size is the same. there should not be a need to buy 'special Apple xserve hard drives'. if you buy a drive larger than 500 GB then the extra space beyond 500 GB will just be ignored depending on the type of RAID you have setup. definitely do not buy a disk smaller than 500 GB. pull out the disk that is bad and see what the make/model is. my xserve uses Seagate drives so you could probably just search eBay or whatever for the model number of the drive and use that. the hard drive should be able to be removed from the caddy so you don't really need a whole new "module".
as for power supplies those are proprietary and will need to be purchased thru apple or somewhere else like eBay, just search for the part number...

Proper drive modules for a G5 Xserve?

Hi all,
We need up upgrade the drive modules in a G5 Xserve. I checked in the apple store, and the 750 GB SATA modules have this line:
"These Serial ATA Apple Drive Modules are qualified for use only with the new Intel-based Xserve. For Xserve RAID or older Xserve (G4 based) products, use the Apple Drive Module with Ultra ATA (parallel) support only. For Xserve G5 systems, use the previous generation Serial ATA drive modules."
The problem is, I don't see this "previous generation Serial ATA drive modules" anywhere. Similarly, the Ultra ATA drives have this line:
"These Ultra ATA drives are qualified for use with Xserve RAID only. For Xserve G5 or Intel-based products, use the Apple Drive Module with Serial ATA only. "
My question is, what drive modules should I be using?!
Also, does anyone think Apple will be coming out with 1 TB modules in the near future, and if so, what are the odds of compatibility with the G5 Xserves?

Hey guys,
A heads up.. I've had 4 flavors of SATA ADM:
1. 80GB SATA Hitachi (xserve g5 gen)
2. 80GB SATA Seagate (intel gen)
3. 250GB SATA (xserve g5 gen)
4. 750GB SATA (intel g5 gen)
Needless to say, all 4 work in either the xserve g5 or intel, and either can boot as long as the partioning is setup appropriately (guid or apple). With that said, there actually is a GB size difference between the 2 80GB models, which does make life complicated if you have an only xserve g5 and want to get a new 80GB to make a raid 1 (either the solution is to look for an older model on ebay or to wipe both drives).

Xserve G5 Drive Module meets Apple Store Lunacy

Dear Apple,
I don't understand... you force me to buy drive modules from you which I'm cool with. But you only give me a 74GB option?!? Seriously. Program me a drive larger than 74GB and make me pay a fortune for it, but don't leave me with only one option and nothing else. This really discourages me from wanting to buy more Xserves.
I feel very like a very disappointed customer right now.
Michael

Here is the link to the 750GB SATA for Xserve G5 from the Apple store:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=6C0 4E172&nplm=MA504G/A
But the bottom of the page states this:
Apple Drive Module Serial ATA Compatibility: These Serial ATA Apple Drive Modules are qualified for use only with the new Intel-based Xserve. For Xserve RAID or older Xserve (G4 based) products, use the Apple Drive Module with Ultra ATA (parallel) support only. For Xserve G5 systems, use the previous generation Serial ATA drive modules.
The problem being experienced by the original poster is what brought me here! I went nuts yesterday trying to track down just what drive modules are available for the Xserve G5!
Message was edited by: iGary

Does 750gb drive module work with old generation xserve g5?

i would like to replace my drive module in my xserve g5 running ver 10.3.9 with apples 750gb sata drive modules. My problem is can't get a straight answer from anyone about whether or not it will work with my xserve.
Any ideas?

They do.. a 750GB SATA ADM will work perfectly fine on both the intel and the g5 xserves. It says explicitly on the box "Intel xServe required" but after talking to a enterprise tech, he stated that apple "has not fully officially tested on the g5 cause its a discontinued machine.. aka, they refuse to write that it is "supported".
Didnt stop me from buying one and using it for hot swapping between my g5 and intel tho.. works like a charm.

Maximum size for Xserve RAID modules

What is the maximum storage size for an Xserve RAID module?
Years ago, an Xserve RAID was out of my price range. Now, I'm looking into getting one on eBay and playing around with it.
I have been making Mirrored RAIDS with Western Digital 3 TB My Books.
Can I put 3 TB drives in an Xserve RAID? It probably depends on the controller firmware or something.
Thanks for thinking about this.
Doc

Short answer is no, you can't.
The XServe RAID has IDE drives mounted in a carrier. The maximum size drive shipped by Apple, supported under 1.5.1 firmware on the controllers is 750GB, though finding these on the used market is farily difficult. Aside from that, any IDE drive can be put in the carriers. If your unit has 'blank' slots, these are indeed just blank slots - you will need to get carriers / drive modules if you want disks in the slot if that makes sense.
People on the Internet, myself included, have experimented down the route of using IDE to SATA bridges in the carriers with 2.5" SATA drives which are more freely available. This way you can utilise cheap drives in your drive modules, or even SSDs (which offer little benefit I have found). Some users have had success with 1TB 2.5" SATA drives in this method, but not with anything bigger it seems. Myself, I've had suceess with 500GB SATA and 256GB SSD with this hacky method.
Hope that helps.

External Enclosure for Drive Module?

We are setting up an emergency contingency strategy and we would like to be able to remove a drive module from our Xserve, then use it on another computer. Ideally we would like an external Firewire drive enclosure that would accept the Apple Drive Module as is. That's vs. unscrewing the drive from the module and installing it in an enclosure or in another computer. Has anyone seen anything like this? A carry bag or case for the drive module would be handy also. Thanks for any pointers.
Xserve G5 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Joseph-
Not trying to be an arse, but what about another XServe? I do not know how backwards compatible your drive modules are (as in a used G4 XServe), but certainly even a single processor node with no license would probably end up costing about the same as a specialty-type external housing.
Heck, that would possibly give you an entire contingency strategy in a box.
Just a thought. I know a nice case in the 300 dollar or less range would be superb, but I think they get you on that Apple proprietary thing.
-DaddyPaycheck

Array degraded but all drive modules are OK

Hi !
The Xserve RAID is a 14 x 250 Gb P-ATA model. One of the module went bad 3 months ago; I had no spare and the applecare replacement took a whole month to arrive. In the mean time, I bought an Apple 400 Gb P-ATA module and used it without any problem (had to upgrade to 1.5).
Once I received the replacement 250 Go and since I had to reformat the array anyway (purpose of the RAID changed), I swapped the 400 for the 250 and kept the former as a spare.
Sorry for the looong intro, but now, the problem :
Another drive went bust and had to be replaced. Swapped the bad 250 for the "spare" 400 module. A yellow light appeared on the module instead of the green one. No rebuilding was done.
RAID admin says that the array is degraded but if I look at the drives, they are all OK. The only "problem" is that the Drive Cache is disabled for this module and enabled for the others in the array. I tried to re-enable it through the settings but if I restart the array, It switches back to disabled.
I tried to force a parity rebuild. Took almost 5 seconds and did not work. the event log states :
Timestamp: 06/03/06 06:58:42 PM
Priority: Error
Controller: Lower Controller
Type: 47
Event ID: 799
Event: RAID Set 1 Rebuild Complete (-200001)
Description: The RAID set finished rebuilding.
Last thing I tried was to shut down, unplug, wait, replug, restart. done nothing.
I would like to reformat the drive module but I have no P-ATA xserve here. I thought It might have come from the fact It was used before in the same array.
Any ideas ?
Thx.
Eric.

Me again. I backup up the data and deleted the array. When I try to create a new one, the drive module in question is unselectable and a message states :
Drive 12 already belongs to a RAID set. (except it doesn't). I more and more wish I had a P-ATA xserve to format the drive in, but I don't. Any idea on how to format directly a drive module in a Xserve RAID?

Drive Module Removal

This may be a stupid question, but this seems like a very un-Apple like behavior to me...
I have an Xserve G5 with 3 x 250Gb drives in a RAID 5 configuration using the PCI RAID card. With the security lock engaged, if I even push on one of the drive module coverplates (i.e. so that the 'handle' pops out) without removing the drive, it completely trashes the RAID, sets off the audible alarm, etc. Note that I never actually remove the drive, and I can't since the security lock is engaged. But just popping out the handle and then pushing it back in again results in the RAID having to go through a complete rebuild sequence which takes hours.
Is this normal?

We have the same setup. Most of what you are saying is normal.
In a 3 drive RAID 5 configuration if 1 drive becomes disengaged it should not destroy the whole RAID. It just makes the 1 drive unreadable by the RAID. The data on the RAID should still be accessible and usable, but I would avoid making too many changes during the rebuild. Too many changes during a rebuild could extend the rebuild time. However you can only lose 1 drive in a 3 drive RAID 5 configuration and still rebuild the RAID. If you lose 2 drives the RAID will be completely destroyed. We have also ran into problems with Drive 0 in the RAID. If the server gets rebooted during the rebuild of Drive 0 it may not reboot properlly and may cause the RAID to be destroyed which would mean a reinstall and restore from backup. So be careful when rebuilding Drive 0.
If you open Terminal and go to the man pages for megaraid you can silence the alarm (megaraid -alarm -silence). This will at least make the procedure less painful since it takes a 250 GB drive a minimum of 4 hours to rebuild depending on the amount of data in the RAID. The RAID alarm will sound if a drive fails too even if it is not disengaged so it is nice to know how to silence the alarm and find out which drive failed through the megaraid tools.
There is very good documentation on the Apple Server Support page
http://images.apple.com/server/pdfs/UsingHardwareRAID.pdf
Happy RAIDing

Buying drive modules

We are looking for two 80 GB drive modules used in a G5... some questions I hope for assistance:
1. Are all drive modules suited for all XServes, mainly the ones not specifically listed either suited for an Intel or G5 XServe ?
2. Are there compatible drive modules from 3rd party manufacturers ?
While a 80 GB SATA harddisk from Hitachi costs around 50 Euro, Apple charges for the same capacity 220 Euro including the drive enclosure. Anyway, I need the ability to check the SMART status using "Server Monitor"... I got told in a thread before that Apple neither sells the drive enclosures alone nor may non-Apple drives allow displaying their SMART status displayed in Apple tools.

Thank you for your reply.
Has that 50 Euro drive been tested and burned in?
You got me. I must confess that it is a common harddrive, not explicitly designed for a server environment. Checking this against Hitachi's website, the model is a Deskstar 7K80.
I shortly looked for a server harddisk from the same manufacturer, an UltraStar costs around 170 Euro, so when adding the value of the drive enclosure, we more or less come to the 220 Euro Apple charges.
Okay, so finally seeing all that trouble, I guess it is more convenient to buy an Apple part; the savings are not worth the needed time for finding a matching harddrive and dealing with the SMART issue (furthermore the fact that I would need to get a drive enclosure).
Each drive has their own parameters for SMART monitoring. Apple cannot
predict what parameters other drive manufacturers have set.
Not sure about, but I assumed that there is a list of standard (or at least widely-accepted) SMART parameters each manufacturer may extend with own specific parameters optionally.
Regarding Apple and SMART I understood that the drive's BIOS has a flag like "I'm from Apple" used by Apple's utilities to show the SMART status. Otherwise, they ignore SMART (little pushing to buy Apple original drives But maybe I'm totally wrong.
Also, consider warranty and support.
Have you an idea if Apple provides an insurance against data loss that ships with the drive ?

Older Drive Modules

Recently made the Intel transition after years of steadfast performance from my XServe G5. My new Intel XServe is using two drive bays with mirrored RAID. I've wanted to keep the old XServe G5 boot volume around just in case I need an old config file or log, but there isn't really a convenient way to mount it.
Supposedly, the XServe G5's drive modules are not supposed to work with the Intel XServe, but I popped one into the spare drive bay and it mounted immediately. I'm guessing that Apple says they're unsupported due to lack of hardware monitoring and so forth? That said, I see no harm in temporarily parking my old drive module in my new XServe, as long as I'm not actively using it for boot/write.
What is people's experience with using old drive modules in new machines or vice-versa?

DaddyPayCheck? I know you have some input on this... I accept links to old posts that didn't show up in my search results.
Pretty please?

Can I use nonuniform drive module sizes?

I have an XServe RAID full of 400 GB drive modules, which Apple is no longer making. Apple is making 500s, however. If one of my 400s fails, can I replace it with a 500? To make it work, do I need to do anything different than I would do if I swapped in a 400?
For what it's worth, I don't care about the extra 100 GB in the 500. If it had 400 GB of effective raw capacity, that would be fine. I just need something that works.

If you plug in a 500GB it will work but only as a 400GB module because the logical volume size needs to match the others. It sounds like that's all you're looking for so it shouldn't be a problem. You need to make sure your firmware version is at least as late as current with the largest size drive you want to install.
There are some potential (maybe just theoretical) problems with running different drives sizes because of assumptions made about drive speed and how "full" a drive resulting in unexpected wear on a drive over the long term. But the 400s and 500s are about as close as you can get so I don't think too much concern in your situation.
HTH,
=Tod

How to find drivers for XSERVE-RAID module bought 2 years ago?

Hello,
2 years ago, we puchased a Xserve raid module. About 3 months later, they came up with the Primse Vtrack. Now we are looking to add drives to our old X-Serve-Raid module and we can't find anywhere to buy them. Any idea? it is currently loaded with Hitachi Deskstar 250GB Drives (from teh sticker on the drives)

I believe they are still available at a massively overinflated price as Apple Service parts. Over here in the UK the only places I have found them is on eBay and on http://www.scrumpymacs.co.uk/ (Scrumpy Macs) - email them if you can't find them on the site. They sell drives with ATA drives, or just the bare caddies.
I've recently had to increase storage on a budget so purchased 10 caddies, then 10x500 GB drives for them from a 3rd party supplier which are the same drive used in 'legit' drive modules.
Hope that helps

500GB Apple Drive Module

I want to purchase a 500GB Apple Drive Module for an XServe G5 that is running Panther. The product description for the drive claims that Tiger is required while this page http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107569 makes no mention of the Tiger requirement. Which source should I trust? Has anyone else out there put this drive in a Panther XServe G5?
Dual G5 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Hi,
The only difference I know between XServe G4 and Xserve G5 is G4 use parallele drive and G5 Serial.
I don't think Tiger is required and I can't see why it should be. Unless Panther cannot handle 500 GB drive.

G5 xserve drive module

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