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Caution...
Authored by: Frederico on Mar 29, '04 08:05:59PM

Not only should you not reverse an Ultra ATA cable, but hard drives should not be hosted on cables longer than 18-24 inches (at least according to the original ATA-66 spec; may have changed with ATA-100/133, but I think the G5 ATA bus is ATA-66, anyway). Longer cables are fine for optical drives.

Data loss/corruption is likely to occur with voltage drops using the longer cables on HDD, so user beware...

That said, and without opening up a G5, however, if memory serves from stripping opticals out in favor of RAID sets, you should be able to build a custom cable that loops to the optical drive (which should then be set as Slave) and over to the HDD (which will then be Master), and maintain ~20 inches overall.



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Caution... FOLLOW-UP
Authored by: Frederico on Mar 29, '04 08:36:59PM
Just a follow-up, it is a limit of 18 inches for HDD: REF: Hard Drive Installation Details

We experimented with longer cables back when the B&W G3 and early G4s came out, trying to stuff HDDs in above the optical bay, and we had definite data loss issues using longer cables routed around the case to emulate the Apple cables. We always had to build custom cables to stay within 18" spec. To that end, seems like there's just enough room to snake an (unmounted) 3.5" HDD on top of the optical drive in the G5; just use a standard 80/40 ATA HDD cable, and respect the Master/Slave positions as outlined in the referenced article above.

To the original poster, you should be *extremely* cautious about trusting this drive to critical data until you shorten the cable to 18". If it hosts your boot OS or VM swap, I'd be looking for KPs.

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