Thread

3 hard drives in Rev 1 B&W

68kMLA · Hardware · 10 posts · Jun 20, 2009 — Jun 24, 2009 View original thread ↗

#1 Sat, 20 Jun 2009 - 23:39 68kMLA

Yes, I've finally done it. I've had 2 drives running flawlessly in my 1st B&W G3 for many years now, so today I decided to try and get 3 running in my #2 G3. Specs are very simple. Originally 300MHz overclocked to 350MHz with a CD-ROM drive and 448MB of RAM. I was able to install a 20Gb drive in the ZIP drive bay sharing the CD-ROM bus and set as master device. The regular hard drive bus has another 20GB drive and the original 6GB drive together. The trick is the order in which you attach the drives. The master drive has to be furthest away from the motherboard on the ATA cable, and the slave drive will be set on the middle connector. This has been the case on both of my Rev 1 B&W G3's. So far its running 10.4.11 just fine and I haven't seen any problems. Anybody else been running multiple drives on Rev 1 B&W G3's?

#2 Sat, 20 Jun 2009 - 23:51 68kMLA

The forum user Aoresteen had been also been able to do this in his Rev 1 B&W; he hasn't posted in a while though.

#3 Sun, 21 Jun 2009 - 01:38 68kMLA

I did that some time back. Used three 10gb drives raided.

Wayne

#4 Sun, 21 Jun 2009 - 02:39 68kMLA

What is the difference with Rev 1 and 2 with respect to HDs? I have 2 Rev 2 units and both I think have a 1 single and 2 dual HD trays (for 5 total) plus the cdrom and zip drive bay. I have 3 drives in both.

#5 Sun, 21 Jun 2009 - 03:08 68kMLA

I had 4 hard drives in my Gigabit G4. As long as jumper settings are set. It works. Sure I had no optical drive, but it worked.

#6 Sun, 21 Jun 2009 - 03:35 68kMLA

I had 4 hard drives in my Gigabit G4. As long as jumper settings are set. It works. Sure I had no optical drive, but it worked.

I think the point of this thread is that normally Rev 1 B&Ws are known to have drive corruption issues when using a slave drive.(at least on the bus the HDDs were on by default or something, been a while since I looked into it so cannot remember exactly) It was fixed in the Rev 2.
Guys, as I recall there was an app written specifically for testing HDD corruption floating around the internet. You would need O S9 to run it though.

#7 Mon, 22 Jun 2009 - 08:15 68kMLA

I had 4 hard drives in my Gigabit G4. As long as jumper settings are set. It works. Sure I had no optical drive, but it worked.

That's nothing special. The Rev A. B&W G3 has a rather dodgy IDE controller chip which was later changed to solve the problems aforementioned.

#8 Wed, 24 Jun 2009 - 03:34 68kMLA

Rev 1 B&W G3 does NOT support booting from slave IDE devices because the on-board ROM for the controller does not understand how to access slave devices. OS X overcomes this because it loads a software "ROM" to handle the IDE controller. If you want to maintain the ability to boot from CD/DVD, you'll need to set the optical drive back to master.

Rev 1 B&W G3 IDE controllers introduced drive corruption on certain UDMA hard drives. As the ROM for the controller is updated in OS X, it's probably safe to use any drive under OS X.

Rev 2 B&W G3 does not suffer from either of these problems.

All you ever wanted to know: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/g3-zone/yosemite/IDE/

Peace,

Drew

#9 Wed, 24 Jun 2009 - 03:53 68kMLA

Rev 1 B&W G3 does NOT support booting from slave IDE devices because the on-board ROM for the controller does not understand how to access slave devices. OS X overcomes this because it loads a software "ROM" to handle the IDE controller. If you want to maintain the ability to boot from CD/DVD, you'll need to set the optical drive back to master.
Rev 1 B&W G3 IDE controllers introduced drive corruption on certain UDMA hard drives. As the ROM for the controller is updated in OS X, it's probably safe to use any drive under OS X.

Rev 2 B&W G3 does not suffer from either of these problems.

All you ever wanted to know: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/g3-zone/yosemite/IDE/

Peace,

Drew

Thats good to know about booting into OSX from CD. Looks like I'll probably have to switch the CD drive back to master cuz I'll probably never boot from the drive on that bus.

#10 Wed, 24 Jun 2009 - 19:36 68kMLA

Right.

Rev 1 B&W G3 does NOT support booting from slave IDE devices because the on-board ROM for the controller does not understand how to access slave devices. OS X overcomes this because it loads a software "ROM" to handle the IDE controller.

If it's not clear to the reader, what I should have said in my post above was that OS X overcomes the problem of no support for slave devices by overriding the built-in ROM once OS X has already booted. So you can use slave devices on the bus, but only after OS X is running. To make a device bootable, it must be available before OS X has booted, and therefore it must be configured as a master.
Peace,

Drew