Will G3 Mac pro recognize large firewire 400 hard drive

I have an older G4 Mac Pro and I'm wondering if I can connect/use a larger hard drive via firewire 400. I understand there is a limitation on the size of drive attached internal, but does the same limit apply to firewire attached drives?

Wow Kappy, thanks for the rapid reply & Yes, you are correct, my mistake, it is indeed a PowerPC.
So I could attach a 2TB drive and use this machine as an iTunes server?

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I have a mac pro 1.1. the main hard drive failed. How do I reload OS X 10.7 back in my computer. the app store will not let me reinstall this os. My computer is not compatible OS x 10.8?

I have a mac pro 1.1. the main hard drive failed. How do I reload OS X 10.7 back in my computer. the app store will not let me reinstall this os. My computer is not compatible OS x 10.8?

You need to first install the OS your Mac came on the bundled gray disks. Assuming it's Snow Leopard, you could then login into the App Store using your same Apple ID and password to download and install Lion.
If your Mac is a bit older and came with Leopard, 10.5.x, you can bypass that and install Snow Leopard from your retail disk. The only software you'd need to install separately from the gray disks would be the optional software, such as the iLife suite and other titles not included on the retail SL disk.

My Mac Pro only has a 250GB hard drive. can I use my 1TB hard drive from my windows computer, they're bith SATA

my Mac Pro only has a 250GB hard drive. can I use my 1TB hard drive from my windows computer, they're bith SATA

You want system, data, backup etc. Make good use of the four internal drive bays.
You will have to use Disk Utility to ERASE or click on drive and use PARTITION to make it Mac writeable.

Are (some) external firewire 400 hard drives just cased sata drives?

Are (some) external firewire 400 hard drives just cased sata drives? If so, I think I'd like to bust open my external 160GB Lacie and mount it internally...
I have no idea if they are or not, it just crossed my mind at one point.

Possible but unlikely. PATA drive remain less expensive in bulk and PATA ->FW enclosures are more mature and wide spread than SATA->FW. Larger drive cap. drives are more likely to be SATA.

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I am seriously looking at purchasing a 15" Mac Pro this year - I know what specs I want, but I am curious as to what Mac users do re the extra hard drives? I am used to having a second hard drive on my PC for scratch discs for the Creative Suites including CS4. What do Mac users use for extra scratch discs? Do you use a removable drive? Apple tells me that I can't have any second hard drive in the Mac Pro or iMac, hence my query. (I will also be attaching my Wacom Cintiq 21UX to it as well.) Thank you.

Thank you Steve - however I use the scratch disc in both Illustrator and Photoshop and Premiere, hence it becomes a more general question.
In moving to a Mac I am trying to understand whether the drives work differently, or can you partition the main drive on a Mac and use those partitions for scratch discs?

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I want to add a firewire 400 PCIe card to my Mac Pro as a last ditch effort to get my Presonus Firepods working properly. Presonus recommends the firewire card have a TI chipset. See my thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2770203&tstart=0
Two questions:
1. Any card recommendations known to work with large quantity audio throughput?
2. Most every card I've reviewed has a card-mounted molex power connector; will I need to supply auxiliary power to this connector to provide enough power for the Firepods?
2a. If I do need to provide auxiliary power to the card. Where do I pick it up from? Is there a connector/cable somewhere inside the Mac Pro?
TIA

I'd take a look at the Sonnet range of cards. I use them for video, which I guess has similar throughput and lack-of-latency requirements to multi-channel audio.
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/allegrofw400pcie.html
I believe you only need the aux.power feed to such cards *if your FW devices take power down the FW cable*. If your FW devices are separately powered from the AC mains, I suspect you won't need the aux.power feed to the card.
If you find you do need an aux.power feed, I guess you can find an adapter/extender from the unused second optical disk drive power connector?

Mac Pro 3,1 - did my hard drive die? And what should I replace it with?

Hi,
I inherited my late husband's 2008 Mac Pro (3,1 model) which had 2 x 500GB hard drives in it and 6GB of RAM. I filled the remaining hard drive bays with 1TB drives (I take a lot of video so needed the extra space). The boot drive was partitioned 50/50 in Boot Camp. I've upgraded the RAM to 10GB and I am currently running Lion.
Today, while doing something as innocuous as scrolling down a web page, the bottom half of my screen went black and the top half began flashing wildly. When it stopped after several seconds, the mouse would not respond and I could not click on anything. If flashed a bit more, and then I had mouse control back but could not click on anything - web links, applications, finder. After waiting patiently but getting nowhere, I powered the machine down manually, and when I re-started it, it failed to boot. The chime sounded, the apple appeared, and the little revolving wheel, but at the point where the screen would normally go blue then display the desktop, it just went white. The fans spin, but otherwise it's very silent.
I tested with a second display, got the same issue. I tried booting to recovery mode but it went back to the white screen. I could start in target mode, and there were no issues with flickering screen, so I don't think it's the graphics card. Then I tried browsing to the hard drive over the network, but it wasn't showing on the PC network page, nor could I connect to it via the home theater system, which I can normally do as the streaming app launches on start-up. I am assuming this means the drive has failed? It's the original, and we bought the machine when they were new to the market, so is a good 5 years old. It contains not only the boot drive but my documents, photos, websites, selected videos, all of which are backed up on the Time Capsule, and I was in the process of uploading to cloud backup as well (although not very far along, due to data cap and slow international upload speeds). I had no warning it was about to do this, but then I guess sometimes you don't!
Assuming I need to replace the drive, would it be worth replacing it with an OWC Mercury Electra 480GB SSD in an Icy Dock sled? Or would that be overkill for such an old machine? Would getting a standard 7200 WD Caviar HDD or similar give me enough of a speed boost? Obviously I am rather enamoured with the idea of a blazing fast SSD but I'd have to import it (not available locally) so I don't want to shell out all that money unless it's really going to make a massive difference.
Is there anything else I would need to know about using an SSD over a HDD? I assume I would fire it up the normal way - install it, boot from my Snow Leopard install disc (I downloaded Lion from the App Store) format it, clean install SL, then re-update to Lion, then restore my Time Machine backup? Am I likely to experience any weird issues due to it being an SSD? I see talk online of firmware problems and something called TRIM that I don't know anything about. If it's most likely that I can install it and rock on as normal, then I'm pretty keen, but if there's a reasonable probability of it being temperamental, I probably wouldn't be willing to deal with that (and therefore go the HDD route instead). Therefore I am very keen to hear people's opinions and experiences.
Sorry for the terribly long ramble. The more I have researched this, the more questions it raises! All advice gratefully accepted. Thanks!

more than likely it is your video card. If it is ATI 2600XT, tell it bye-bye. The card is barely used at all in TDM or Safe Boot Mode. The 2600 and Lion and the issues with that card, even if it seems okay, is not.
Depending on Windows OS as to how it mounts and sees your Lion HFSX (there is a nice HFSX driver from Paragon, and an NTFS driver for Lion too)
480GB SSD is overkill for any system unless you are pushing CS6 2-3GB images and then for scratch. All you need for a boot drive is about 100GB.
If you have an SSD now, then 1) you need to do a full image backup and restore (regularly as maintenance), and 2) TRIM Enabler
Save Lion and you can always do a clean Lion install w/o going back to SL - but you might want to keep SL (dual boot) and handy if you run into anything you still need that required PowerPC/Rosetta
FBDIMM RAM dies, Amazon has $32 kits of 4GB. And having all 8 DIMM slots filled improves things. If you need or want to and feel 16GB isn't overkill.
SSD and issues are always possible. you should not just go along. not without a clone image. And you should have another drive w/ TRIM Enabler so that you can do a repair and "trim" what is needed.
Clone a system with CCC regularly. Bootable. And can also be used by Setup Assistant.
Install Lion over a heavily used SL system and there are likely remnants of old things that get in the way and left in there and not removed.

Mac Pro 2008 Not Recognizing SATA Hard Drives After Power Failure...

So we recently had a weird power "outage" where the power still seemed to be surging some (my monitor was blinking wouldn't turn completely off until I yanked the plug on it), and to my dismay, when the power came back on, I started having boot issues with my Mac. Luckily I had a couple of identical dual-quad core machines sitting around (workgroup environment), swapped my hard drive into one of them, and was back in business on-the-fly.
However, I'm now trying to troubleshoot the faulty machine (qihout throwing parts at it yet) and am stuck at an impasse. With the hard drive of the secondary machine cross-installed into the one that got "hit" by the outage, I simply got the chime and then it stuck on the dreaded gray screen, and out of all the boot options, the only one that would get me a different result was to try to option-boot into the Startup Manager, which would still give me the gray screen but also a mouse cursor after about a minute. Zapped PRAM... reset SMU... even swapped CMOS battery... all to no avail.
So I started yanking things. Memory.. video card... and finally the one and only (swapped) hard drive. The last one did it, and I was finally able to option-boot, start up from the Installation CD, and ultimately, D-boot into the hardware tests on the CD. Ran both normal and extended tests and everything checked out fine, with no errors (and based on the potetnial error messgaes I read about, these tests check everything from the logic board to the power supply, and voltage across both).
Now I'm torn and not sure which route to go from here. Machine seems to operate relatively normally when booting from CD... all hardware tests pass... Super Drive works (not sure it that's SATA or PATA, but guessing the latter at this point)... it just won't take a hard drive (which I verified is fine in another computer), regardless of which of the 4 bays I put it in. I'm also hard presed to believe that the power outage/surges caused the SATA cable(s) to go bad yet nothing else, which still have me leaning towards SATA controller on the board or a power supply issue despite the fact the tests passed.
Thoughts, opinions, or comments... from experience or otherwise? Thanks in advance!

Look hatter. I'm not saying it doesn't, but "prevention" is not why I started the thread. It was to troubleshoot the already existing problem, and you suggesting I run out and drop a combined $1000 on UPS units for each of the five 2008 Mac Pros I still have in my department is neither contributory to the thread topic nor cost-effective just to (possibly) prevent another (what seems to now be) $10 cable issue yet another 6 years down the road. Thanks, though. :/
Well it wasn't the power supply, nor apparently the SATA controller (I don't believe at this point). I finally got the hard drive to recognize and boot again, but ended up having to use one of the two extra SATA connector ports on the board (which I can only assume are handled by the onboard SATA controller as well) and a 4-pin molex to SATA power adapter connected to the power output for the secondary optical drive. As such, It very well may just be the "Hard Drive Harness Cable", although I need to order a male to female SATA extension cable so I can hook the drive up directly to the data side of that the drive bay connectors to determine whether it's the data side or the power side causing issues. I'm again assuming power, since the extra SATA ports seem to work, I'm pretty sure the drive isn't spinning up fully, yet the bays obviously 'recognize' there's a drive in there (thus the gray screen when one is plugged in).
Anyway - I'll update when I get to that point, primarily for posterity's sake, as I found several "unresolved" gray screen threads on the web (and even in these forums) that sounded just like mine yet offered little ultimate help. In the meantime, does anyone want to speculate on whether it's the cable itself or maybe the SATA chain power plug on the board could be bad? It looks to be pretty close to the main power input connector on the board, so just wondering if (worst case scenario) something could have popped on the board between the two? Seems unlikely, but...
Either way, I can always work around it all if necessary by utilizing the same setup I got it to boot with.

Mac Pro 2007 No Power to Hard Drives

While changing hard drives in my Mac Pro 2007 (model 2,1) today, I apparently shorted something out and there is no longer power being provided to any of the hard drives or the super drive. On first boot attempt, the fans went into over drive and I smelled something burning, so I quickly turned it off and reinstalled the original drive.
I am able to boot up off a Yosemite installer USB flash drive and run Disk Utility - confirmed that none of the disks are visible. Everything else on the computer seems to be running fine.
Does this sound like a power supply issue or I have a fried something on the main logic board?
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Ryan

Disk drive connector (AMP MATE-N-LOK 1-480424-0 Power Connector)
AMP MATE-N-LOK 1-480424-0 Power connector (female pins)
Type
Electrical power connector
Production history
Manufacturer
AMP
Produced
1963
General specifications
Width
21 mm (female), 23 mm (male)
Height
6 mm (female), 8 mm (male)
Pins
4
Electrical
Signal
Yes
Max. voltage
12 V
Max. current
11 A/pin (30 °C rise)
Pin out
Male Pins (Female Connector)
Pin
Color
Type
Pin 1
Yellow
+12 V
Pin 2
Black
Ground
Pin 3
Black
Ground
Pin 4
Red
+5 V
18 AWG wire is typically used.
The desktop computer hard-drive connector is pictured here. It has 4 conductors, with the standard pinout as follows:
Pin #
Color
Function
1
Yellow
+12 V
2
Black
Ground
3
Black
Ground
4
Red
+5 V
SOURCE:
images and text from wikipedia.org

Mac Pro Slower after adding second hard drive

My work computer is a Mac Pro 3,1 running Lion 10.7.3 with 4GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive. It was performing well running programs like Adobe CS5 and Final Cut Pro until I added a second 1TB drive (Western Digital WD1001FALS). After that upgrade Photoshop is way slower while programs like InDesign and Final Cut are noticable slower.
Is there any reason for this? Anything that can be done outside of a memory upgrade?

Let me try to direct you to some tips on CS5, and suggest that more hard drives properly used (OS, scratch, data, backup, array) can help, but that one drive and 4GB RAM is under performing.
Optimize Photoshop CS5
Optimizing Photoshop Overview
Adobe Photoshop FAQ
Optimize performance Photoshop
What are you using the WD1001FALS for? data? scratch?
And open Activity Monitor and check pageouts. Unless your use if very very light, I can't see that as being enough for even CS5 code and some OS X let alone any more apps.
Activity Monitor memory usage

Mac Pro - adding a second 750GB Hard Drive - Best Configuration

I just purchased 2 Mac Pros. For the second one, I plan to use it as a server - thus I'll refer to it as "Mac Pro Server". On this Mac Pro Server, it came with the 250GB hard drive and I purchased a second 750GB hard drive. I plan to backup this total of 1TB to an external 1TB hard drive. I have two of these so I can take one home each week.
I've installed the second 750GB hard drive but I'm not sure the best way to set it up in Disk Utility. Should I keep it a second drive or should I combine it with the 250 to make it a full 1TB? I'll be connecting to the Mac Pro Server server from 3 other Macs in the office mostly moving Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign files.
What would you suggest?
Thank you!!
Zack

Hi,
Just for safety's sake I would leave the drives seperate, if you use RAID to stripe the drives together, and one subsequently fails you may loose everything.
With the 750GB used for the 'serving' aspects, and regularly backed up you should be safer.
Just make sure you have a safe, backed-up startable volume if downtime would be an issue in case of failure of the 750.
A

Installing operational system (MAC OS X) on a new hard drive

Hey Guys,
My Mac Pro came with 250GB of hard drive so I bought a new hard drive, installed it (1TB) and it works just fine but; how can I transform this disk so It can become my main hard drive?
- Do I have to install Mac os X on it? (how do I do that?)
- Is this even possible?
I just want to have more space on my hard drive when working on big projects (graphic design) cuz I only have like 30 GBs of space on my main one so the 1TB one works for me just as an external drive but inside of my Mac Pro.
Can someone give me a hand on this?
Thanks!

I would buy more drives.
Clone your current drive to the 1TB, yes.
SuperDuper $29 is your bet shot.
Keep the old drive as backup.
Use #3 as new backup/clone or for TimeMachine.
Migrate all your project files to drive #4, just change the application preferences to new location.
Shame you waited so long. New drives will also give you a bit better disk performance.

FireWire external hard-drive

Hi, I bought an external hard drive from Welland. It does USB 2.0 and Firewire 400. When I hook-up the drive to my mac mini, everyting is fine, it's work perfectly. But if I don't use it for a day or 2, the drive goes on sleep and when I try to access data on it, it's jam. The front light start to flash and I need to turn off and on. Then it's work. I try to remove the option to put the drives on sleep when possible but no better results

Have you contacted Welland for some support? It's possible the drive is not functioning correctly. I have several FireWire 400 hard drives at home and the one plugged into my G4 Cube goes to sleep quite often without an issue like that when I wake it up. Is the drive powered by USB and/or FireWire?
-Doug

Installing Mac OS X onto an External Hard Drive

Will installing Mac OS X onto an external hard drive erase or mess with in any way files that are already on the external hard drive?
Can I safely install Mac OS X to an external hard drive that already has stuff on it to make it a bootable volume and still be able to access those initial files on the hard drive?

Will installing Mac OS X onto an external hard drive erase or mess with in any way files that are already on the external hard drive?
Not unless an Erase & Install is performed.
Can I safely install Mac OS X to an external hard drive that already has stuff on it to make it a bootable volume and still be able to access those initial files on the hard drive?
Yes.
(42261)

I have a Power Mac G4 (2004) and want to transfer all my files to a new MacBook Pro 15.4". Can this be done thru firewire cable or do I have to transfer to an external Firewire 800 hard drive first?

I have a Power Mac G4 (2004) and want to transfer all my files to a new MacBook Pro 15.4". Can this be done thru firewire cable or do I have to transfer to an external Firewire 800 hard drive first?

Do it with a Firewire cable (buy a 800/400 adapter if you need it) - the USB transfer takes a much longer time.
Start up your old PowerMac G4 holding down the "T" key, for target disk mode.
On your new MacBook Pro open "Migration Assistant" in your utilities folder.
Connect the 2 computers by firewire cable and follow the prompts in Migration Assistant.

Will G3 Mac pro recognize large firewire 400 hard drive

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