Firewire drives larger than 120GB

[1m1]

Anyone have any experience using the newer 4th generation Oxford911 bridge on firewire drives larger than 120GB? I'm considering this for my HD system but would like to know if anyone has any real world experience/success with this.

Thanks

[ppine]

I read something on either the Apple site or macfixit about this. Only the mirror door g4's can recognize drives over 128 gig. They must be formatted in OSX, but then can be used with 9.2.2 as well.


(snipped from Apple)

There are two primary requirements that must be met for higher capacity hard drives to be fully utilized within a computer.

1. The computer must have Mac OS X 10.2 or later.

2. The computer must provide support for the drives via the BootROM.

Mac OS X 10.2 or later

The high capacity drive must be formatted using Mac OS X 10.2 or later for the full capacity of the drive to be available. Once
formatted, the drive will be recognized under the version of Mac OS 9.2.2 that comes with the Power Mac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors)
and later products.

If the drive is not formatted using Mac OS X 10.2 or later, the maximum volume size available is limited to approximately 128 GB.

Support via the BootROM

The BootROM of Power Mac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors) computers and Xserve computers can accommodate these larger drives,
although Apple does not provide technical support for user-installed upgrades in Xserve computers via the built-in drive carriers.

Both Power Mac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors) computers and Xserve computers can take advantage of drives connected via the
FireWire interface.

[Fokke van Saane]

The question was not as an internal HD, but mounted in a IDE-FW housing.

Since Lacie has 500GB FW disks i think it should be no problem. But i like to know for sure too..

Fokke

[rafukyo]

Hi

I have a new 200GB firewire hard drive.
I couldn't initilize it in os 9.1 or 9.2.
But when a fraind of mine initized it on os 10.2.3
my G4s with 9.1 and 9.2 recogzined it as 183GB drive.
hope it helped

[slangification]

Granite Digital (www.granitedigital.com) has been selling Hot Swap enclosures that support drives larger than 120gb since around October, and they've been doing a lot of testing with various drives. I'd recommend calling them and talking to a technician there, and definitely getting a drive that they recommend.

[Lee Blaske]

Taking everything into consideration, are you sure you want a drive large than 120 GB? There's no easy way to partition a Firewire drive with the Mac OS (AFAIK). 120 GB of audio is a LOT of audio. If you had 200 GB of work in progress on a single drive, in a single volume, I would think you could have some pretty serious fragmentation.

These huge drives will make more sense when Apple builds partitioning into their Firewire set-up. For now, at least to me, 80's and 120's in slide in carriers make more sense.

Lee Blaske

[mixer]

i had a 120gig 911 firewire drive but found that it didn't work as well or as fast as the 80gig for audio..so i went back..only use it as a holding drive.