They say if you format a drive with the GUID partition table you can install virtually any size drive in a PowerPC Mac, only you may not be able to boot off of it. An Apple Partition Map is required to boot on a PowerPC Mac, however, this partition scheme is limited to 2.19 TB. If your Power Mac has an ATA/66 (ATA-5) controller, it is limited to 128 GB on the IDE bus but you have some options: Using a SATA PCI card to circumvent this or to use the speed tools ATA software to remove the limit. You can also try mSata drives using adapters, but compatibility may be hit or miss.

What Sparked The Idea

See: Adding SATA to your PowerPC Mac

It’s not necessarily a complicated project or a long story, I just wanted to see how a 6 TB RAID0 array composed of 2x 3 TB SATA 3.0 6 Gb/s drives would behave or show up on a Power Mac G4, plugged into the Sata PCI card. The drives are a pair of backup storage that’s kept in the Mac Pro 3,1 running Mojave and were formatted in Mojave also.

I was half-expecting them not to show up for some reason – a ram stick went bad during testing causing a kernel panic and a hissing sound in the startup chime (which I remedied with a replacement RAM stick). I knew the 3 TB size of each drive was definitively over what any PowerPC Mac had ever shipped with, and I wouldn’t be close to the first person to do this. Though it didn’t hurt to plug them in, test them out, maybe snap a few screenshots – and they worked!

Pulling the drives up in Disk Utility

What’s really unusual is the name of the drives themselves. Although they once lived inside of an OWC Mercury Enclosure, they have since been pulled out of it since they cannot at all function in the enclosure for some reason, so they went in the Mac Pro. Yet the drives show up properly as internal. Although in System Profiler there are no SATA drives, however the Seritek sata RAID card shows up.

(Click to enlarge above image)

(Click to enlarge above image)

All the files I expected have shown up, and there don’t appear to be any issues copying. Obviously the old PCI bus isn’t terribly fast, so the idea here is more storage than speed – although a configuration like this can see performance benefit from a newer Power Mac G4 or G5.

I’ve never actually crammed this much storage in a PowerPC Mac before, my prior record being the 3 TB WD Green HDD for storage on the Dual 2.0 G5 Daily driver. The drive by the way is still alive and kicking to this day! I figured a 3 TB drive could at least show up in leopard and the G4 has a SATA PCI card so I figured why not.. and it works!

While I personally can’t see myself having 6 TB of storage on a PowerPC Mac (unless you’re archiving all the PowerPC software ever, and in that case you need much, much more..), larger drives are becoming cheaper especially if they’re used. Just this past week I found a 3 TB SATA and 6 TB SAS drive for $30 used! I also have two 2 TB Enterprise grade WD hard drives I bought from Micro Center in 2018. They’re still alive and kicking, and are the ones which went in to replace the two drives from the OWC enclosure anyway. Having multiple testimonies as to the longevity of hard drives makes me feel comfortable purchasing them used from reputable places.

(Click to enlarge above image)

(Click to enlarge image above)

• Although the name implies it’s inside an OWC enclosure, the reality is the drives are plugged into a SATA PCI card. Not at all sure how the name carried over.. perhaps it’s hard coded somehow? These DID ship with that exact enclosure I have.. but they are not at all in the enclosure.

In Conclusion

This little test shows the idea works, and it’s definitively possible (with the right hardware combination) to get beyond 2 TB to show up in Mac OS X Leopard on a PowerPC Mac, and with larger than 2 TB sized drives too. There are so many things you can do with so much space – the more, the merrier! I think this article is just to show that it works, to encourage those who were hesitant on this specific aspect – it’s good to go.

While PowerPC Macs have been discontinued about 20 years ago, many storage standards just getting started then are still around today. Today’s drives are alot larger and with some software/hardware workarounds, can work in a PowerPC Mac. With some gumption and a desire to upgrade the old Mac, that ol’ PowerPC Mac can live to see another drive.

See More:

• Fanxiang 1 TB mSata SSD in a Hi-Res 15″ PowerBook G4: So far so good
• Adding PCIe (Yes, PCI-Express) to your AGP/PCI-Based PowerPC Mac
  • (The use of PCIe adapters can allow you to add PCIe SATA adapters or other types of cards only available on PCIe and not at all on PCI/PCI-X)

More PowerPC Mac Upgrades:

• Keepin’ the Power Mac G5 running cool: What worked for me
• Low End Mac Mailbag: Add Wifi 4-Draft and Bluetooth 2.1 to your PowerPC Mac
• Maximizing the AGP Power Mac G5 into space.. and beyond!
• Swapping out a PowerBook G4 DVD drive for a 1 TB Sata Hard Drive
• Adding SATA to your PowerPC Mac
• How to boot USB on PowerPC Macs