I just placed a 500GB Hard Drive in my G5!!!

gearboy · Post by **gearboy** » Tue Aug 22, 2006 7:04 am

Does anyone else on here use a 500GB internal drive in their G5??? Mine is a Western Digital with a 16MB cache, and I believe that it's 300 MB/s.

Here: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=214
Am I asking for trouble???

I went to the store last night to get an internal 250GB drive for my G5 Tower. No 250GB drives in the store. I had to choose between a 160GB, a 300GB, and a 500GB. I always thought that the G5 Towers had a drive limit of 250GB, so I asked the "Mac Expert" what he thought. After trying to convince him that I did really need a SATA drive and not an IDE drive (

), he told me that if the 500GB drive did not work that I could return it, opened or unopened.

My G5 has the 80GB drive that came with it and a 120GB drive that I added two yrs ago (not to mention FW external drives). I backed up the 120GB to the externals, pulled it out, swapped in the 500GB, partitioned it right down the middle with Disk Utility, and now have 580GB of internal space. I am going to purchase a FW case for the 120GB drive.

I copied the contents from the 120GB to partition #1 (Active DP projects *50GB* and iTunes library *70GB*). Everything on that partition is backed up in two other places, so no worries. DP projects open and play fine, iTunes library is rebuilt and plays fine, etc.

The second partition is blank and awaiting a Tiger install so that I'll have two boot drives (this partition with 10.4.7) and a backup of my 80GB system drive. Going forward I would like to replace the 80GB drive with a 250GB or (gasp!) another 500GB drive.

Here: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=214

Comments/Suggestions/Advice appreciated.

Jeff

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Tue Aug 22, 2006 3:57 pm

I just did the same about a couple of months ago on my G5. I didn't partition the drive only because it was my second HD which stored VI samples only-- no apps or system software. In fact, in my case I was told not to partition my drive for my purposes. I had been using an array of FW drives just to be able to tote the drive to and from other studios, etc. But I really ached for the performance of SATA for my larger sound libraries. All is working well, happy to report.

But it sounds as if you did the right thing by partitioning your drive since you are going to make it a multi-boot. Congrats on the extra G's!!