Recommendations for SSD's for a G5

[trigf]

I bought a couple of SSD's on sale over the holidays and thought that using one of them to replace the 160GB drive in my June 2004 G5 might be fun. Both of the SSD's I chose are easily seen and managed by disk utility, but neither will boot after using CCC to clone them. In researching this, it appears that the SATA III spec is not as backwards compatible as it claims, and that the G5 cannot reliably boot off of a SATA III drive, spinning platter or SSD. 

So I'm wondering if anyone has a recommendation for a SATA I or II drive that they've had luck using as a boot drive in the early G5's? 

 

[johnklos]

If a Power Mac G5 can see a drive, then it can boot off of it. There are issues with certain drives that don't properly fall back to 1.5 Gbps, but if you can use CCC to clone, then your drives are working.

If your SSDs are larger than the 160 gig drive, then boot off of another drive or DVD, then use `dd` to copy the 160 gig drive exactly as-is. Or just do a clean install on the SSD.

 

[waynestewart]

Which brand of SSD did you buy?

 

[trigf]

If a Power Mac G5 can see a drive, then it can boot off of it. There are issues with certain drives that don't properly fall back to 1.5 Gbps, but if you can use CCC to clone, then your drives are working.

I wish this was the case, but this is not true for me in the least. I can clone it, but it will not boot from it. There are posts on Apple's discussion boards that show many people have had issues with SATA III drives that are not seen or bootable using the on-board bus of the G5, and it's less of a headache to get a SATA I or II drive, or even another separate controller. 

I tried a clean install, and it installs the OS, then on reboot - nothing. 

 

[trigf]

Which brand of SSD did you buy?

Patriot. 

 

[johnklos]

I've set up many SSDs, although all were either Toshiba or Samsung, on various models of G4 and G5, without any problems. This is the first I've heard of any problems with booting. Not seeing drives, sure, but I've only ever seen all or nothing - either the drive isn't seen at all, or it's seen and works fine.

It'd be interesting to see what your device tree looks like from Open Firmware.

 

[waynestewart]

Haven't tried Patriot. I did try 3 brands. An intel which initially worked but seemed to lose it's formatting repeatedly. Moved it over to a macbook where it worked fine. A Samsung worked fine until I got rid of the G5. I don't recall the third brand. It had issues as well but is working fine in my Mac Pro