The default Macintosh configuration my PowerPC G5 came in included 250GB of disk space, far less than I need. Additionally, within the last year I’ve have my bacon saved by RAID systems no less than three times. Consequently, I wanted more storage with RAID’s reliability.
This led me to purchase two 500GB SATA drives from Tiger Direct, and two external 500GB OneTouch II Firewire 800/400/USB drives from AxentMicro for backup purposes.
As an amusing aside, I ordered both orders the same day at about 3:30pm. AxentMicro surprised the pants off me, because for $7 in shipping, the order was sitting at my home at 3:00pm the next day — that’s less than 24 hour turn around time, and I paid for cheap ground delivery.
My dad happened to be over and eyeing the drives, so I ordered another online, and again AxentMicro had ultra fast deliver. They win on speed and price! New loyal customer here.
Meanwhile, I checked my TigerDirect order. They still had not processed it. It took two days of phone calls, redirection to an authorization department, and finally when I called a different number to cancel my order, they told me they had a server down and would ship immediately with second day delivery. It arrived three days later, but more importantly they never asked for any proof that I was who I said I was in order to authorize the purchase. Scarey. Next time I’m going to go with another dealer, even if it is slightly more expensive.
That said, the 500GB internal drives arrived just fine. There were no mounting brackets, no screws, no SATA cables, and no instructions — something that would be problematic for a PC install.
I connected an external Firewire drive up, booted, and ran Carbon Copy Cloner to “ghost” the drive; this is uncrippled shareware that makes an exact duplicate of your drive, which means it’s bootable. And unlike XP and it’s System ID (SID) problems, Apple doesn’t make you jump through hoops to clone your environment.
Curious, I opened the G5 case and saw two bays. Holding the existing drive in place was a large, well constructed tab that was simple to flip up.
I was also pleased to see that Apple had the power and data connectors already provided, already connected to the motherboard, and already threaded through the case. Sweet!
Getting the power cable off the drive was a little more problematic and required more force than I felt comfortable doing, but there were no problems.
The drive bay is clever design. The illusion is that you have two drives that slide in, one above the other. You don’t seem to have clearance to get the top one out, and there’s no way to take the case apart. But trust Apple, there’s magic.
Pulling the drive forward causes something interesting to happen. It descends. Those “parallel” tracks are actually kind of S-shaped. The drive came out without a hitch.
As for the special rubber rounded screws for the drive, I took the first set off the drive that came out. And the second set was built into the case right by the drive bay. Clever!
So, the drives slid back in, top one first, which magically lifted into place, followed by the bottom one. The cables connected with ease, and I put the cover back on.
The system booted from my external firewire drive without incident. Using Disk Utility, I built a RAID configuration from the two new drives. (OS X Extended, Journaled — do not use case sensitive, as some applications not used to true Unix don’t get things quite right.)
Then I ran Carbon Copy Clone to move things back.
Rebooting back onto internal drives, it just worked. Ya gotta love Apple!
(If applications don’t work, check the log files — most likely you’ll see “missing” files. Unlike Unix, you do not want case-sensitive filenames with OS X for historical reasons. For instance, Adobe checks for a directory called “version” in one place and “Version” in another, they should be the same, but Windows and default OS X installs don’t make this distinction, so it’d be a legacy artifact. These simple kinds of inconsistency problems suggest Adobe products won’t port to Linux for quite a while, which is a shame.)