Seagate 250GB drives

Someone posted a message here that 250GB drives at Tiger Direct were on sale.

So I ordered one last week, it came today.

Seagate / 250GB / 7200 / 8MB / ATA-100 / EIDE / OEM / Hard Drive (THD-250A)


Put it on my Firewire buss and My Mac G4/Panther sees it as 128GB.

What did I do wrong? The label on the box and on the drive itself says 250GB.

You did nothing wrong. The computer interface you connected the 250 GB drive to, is not capable of addressing over the amount of disk space that you are experiencing. You will need to add a PCI disk drive controller card that will support ATA-6 addressing.

The MAC's up to the Dual Mirrored G4 versions use ATA-5 addressing that supports only 127GB of addresses.

My Quicksilver 2002 dual 1.0 GHz MAC can only address 120 GB drives for this reason and I have 2- 250 GB drives converted to SATA that are mounted inside my G4 cabinet.

I went to CDW.com and found no such controller.

When I get my G5 one of these days, is the G5 ATA-6 ?

For the price they were selling these 250GBs, I don't really mind using at 128GB, and perhaps reformatting when I get my G5.

Anyone have a G5 for sale

Thanks for the hardware addressing answer!

Brad,

The G5 uses Serial ATA drives, not ATA-100 or IDE drives, like the one you just purchased. G4's use IDE/ATA connections Natively, but with limited addressing.

Your choices are either to buy a Firewire enclosure to house that 250 GB disk, and then you will be able to access the entire 250 GB volume or a controller that supports ATA-6 with IDE connections like ones available from www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_ata133.html or SATA connections with an adapter from IDE to SATA like those available at www.firmtek.com/seritek/



Post Edited (07-06-05 16:56)

Actually that is what I did.

I have an external FW box, and I swap Internal drives in and out of it as I need the files on them.

I connect to my dual 1G G4 Panther Firewire port.


Again, for the price I paid, I am not overly diappointed with 128GB... but appreciate the steps to potentially see all 250GB.

One additional bit of information to have it all make sense.

That Firewire enclosure also uses ATA-100/IDE disk drives with a bridge board that converts 1394 to IDE. The older units also were ATA-5 with the same address limitations.

Some units are capable of being updated by using a firmware update program.

The firewire drive enclosure I'm using is by ADS so I went to their web [www.ADStech.com]

They sell a couple of ata6 enclosures. I e-mailed them about firmware upgrade for my ata5, but they said no go.