G4 Dual 1.33ghz Xserve Questions

[iGrant]

Hey Guys,

I know I started another thread, but my dad's buddy that was going to sell me an intel xserve for cheap just gave me an old but in good shape G4 1.33ghz Xserve for free (I will be picking it up this coming weekend), the only thing it doesn't have are hard drives, but all the trays are there, and none of them are fake trays which is nice. I figure for free, its going to be something fun to play with.

My question is can I just slap any kind of pata hard drives in the G4 Xserve and what is the maximum hard drive I can install in the 1.33ghz Xserve?

Thanks
iGrant

 

[Flash SWT]

I haven't been able to find a definitive answer and it looks like the largest drive Apple shipped with that model was 180 GB.
http://support.apple.com/kb/sp102

However it does have an Ultra ATA/133 bus so it shouldn't be limited to any drive size by the hardware bus unless Apple has added some sort of limiter.

.

 

[chrismacguy]

Id try any old drive, because despite What the max Apple ships is, you can normally go much higher, since that G4 wont have a limit on it - It should be good up to 4TB or so capacity.

 

[Yoursh]

I upgraded my old single 1.33 G4 Xserve with third party drives. It had one stock 60GB drive and a 180GB drive from Apple. I bought 2 used drive caddies and installed 2 500Gb Seagate drives in them. They ran fine for 3 years till I upgraded to a Mac mini server earlier this year. Using third party drives should work for you too.

As for max drive size, I'm unsure. Apple only sold PATA drives caddies up to 750GB. So theoretically you should be able to use 750GB drives without any issue. Anything bigger is an unknown. You could try, but make sure you can return the drives if you need to.