PPC Mac G5, Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB and Pro Tools

poncival · 10th January 2009

anyone dealing with these drives at all? Otherworld Computing sells them for $159 I think but we bought 3 of them and I can't get them to work with our dual 2.5 GHz PPC G5, i can put them in a firewire chassis and format them OK and format and copy all our data on it but when I put them in the G5 they don't want to mount or format or anything.

After booting over and over sometimes they mount for a minute and then go away when I try to open them or look at them in disk utility, they will unmount or freeze up.

Supposedly there is a firmware update for these, I have sent my email request to Seagate but now am waiting for the reply, from what I can tell this firmware update has fixed the problem for some people and for other people it has fixed the problem but made the drive slower, has anybody had any luck with these or should I just bite the bullet and return them and get something else?

Any recommendations? I want a really big drive for our main SATA record drive as we have 3 engineers and a lot of sessions and if I could have a 1.5 TB internal and a 1.5 TB external Firewire backup drive that would be awesome.

OWC recommended we get the 1.0 TB firewire drives which is a Hitachi DeathStar insteady of the 1.5 externals because they have had some problems with those, but they didn't mention anything about the 1.5 internals being a problem. Also, supposedly the problems are limited to OSX and Linux users on PPC machines, apparently they work great on intel machines. but it works great so far and we have 750 GB Seagate firewire drives hooked up as well which pretty much takes care of our necessary backup space. Thanks in advance for any input!

BigAl · 10th January 2009

Too many people have problems with this hard drive even with the updates. Just return it unless you want to be the beta tester for Seagate terabyte HD's.

The kernel freezes and the log indicates an ata error. Also, Seagates goes on to say, “These drives are not meant to be used in a RAID environment so we are not going to be working towards a solution for this environment.”

Just too may problems with it for now. Get something else and be done with it. Waste no time on it. Sorry.

johnecon2001 · 10th January 2009

Indeed. The 1.5's have had some serious issues that make me shy away from them. The standard 1TiB's though from Seagate are rock solid in my machine.
If you want added safety, get the ES2's over the 7200.11's.

poncival · 12th January 2009

Are you using them in a G5? We have dual 2 and 2.5 GHZ G5's and we're probably not upgrading the computers anytime in the immediate future, but we need bigger drives The Seagate ES 1.0 TB seems like a good bet

Thanks. any other suggestions?

10th January 2009	#1
poncival Lives for gear Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Mesa, AZ Posts: 685 Thread Starter	PPC Mac G5, Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB and Pro Tools anyone dealing with these drives at all? Otherworld Computing sells them for $159 I think but we bought 3 of them and I can't get them to work with our dual 2.5 GHz PPC G5, i can put them in a firewire chassis and format them OK and format and copy all our data on it but when I put them in the G5 they don't want to mount or format or anything. After booting over and over sometimes they mount for a minute and then go away when I try to open them or look at them in disk utility, they will unmount or freeze up. Supposedly there is a firmware update for these, I have sent my email request to Seagate but now am waiting for the reply, from what I can tell this firmware update has fixed the problem for some people and for other people it has fixed the problem but made the drive slower, has anybody had any luck with these or should I just bite the bullet and return them and get something else? Any recommendations? I want a really big drive for our main SATA record drive as we have 3 engineers and a lot of sessions and if I could have a 1.5 TB internal and a 1.5 TB external Firewire backup drive that would be awesome. OWC recommended we get the 1.0 TB firewire drives which is a Hitachi DeathStar insteady of the 1.5 externals because they have had some problems with those, but they didn't mention anything about the 1.5 internals being a problem. Also, supposedly the problems are limited to OSX and Linux users on PPC machines, apparently they work great on intel machines. but it works great so far and we have 750 GB Seagate firewire drives hooked up as well which pretty much takes care of our necessary backup space. Thanks in advance for any input! __________________ myspace.com/poncival www.thesaltmine.com

10th January 2009	#2
BigAl Gear maniac Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 275	Too many problems Too many people have problems with this hard drive even with the updates. Just return it unless you want to be the beta tester for Seagate terabyte HD's. The kernel freezes and the log indicates an ata error. Also, Seagates goes on to say, “These drives are not meant to be used in a RAID environment so we are not going to be working towards a solution for this environment.” Just too may problems with it for now. Get something else and be done with it. Waste no time on it. Sorry. __________________ The best of music is from an analog tape.

10th January 2009	#3
johnecon2001 Gear Head Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Scottsdale AZ Posts: 54	Indeed. The 1.5's have had some serious issues that make me shy away from them. The standard 1TiB's though from Seagate are rock solid in my machine. If you want added safety, get the ES2's over the 7200.11's. __________________ Yamaha PM5D-RH w/ Waves Y96k and Apogee Big Ben EAW KF761 16 Box Array BagEnd D18E-AD 6 Box substage

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12th January 2009	#4
poncival Lives for gear Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Mesa, AZ Posts: 685 Thread Starter	Are you using them in a G5? We have dual 2 and 2.5 GHZ G5's and we're probably not upgrading the computers anytime in the immediate future, but we need bigger drives The Seagate ES 1.0 TB seems like a good bet Thanks. any other suggestions?