Internal Drives for a G4

[Mrvideo]

[John] “better, more stable drives”

What are better? More stable? disk drives. By brand or what?

If your G4 is a dual morrored door model, you can put 4 disk drives inside it. There are different speed IDE ports inside that system so be sure you know what you are doing.

[Ed Dooley]

One approach that works is to put 2 drives on the ATA100 buss and 2 on the ATA66 buss, and use a FW external boot drive. It gives you a 4 drive RAID, plenty fast enough for uncompressed SD work. Another approach would be to install 4 SATA drives and buy a SATA PCI card to drive them. That would give you even better performance.
Ed

[John Grote, jr.]

Ed,

Please tell me more about the SATA drive setup?

Thanx,

John

[David Bogie]

On my pre-mirror G4 dualies, we had to purchase ATA cards to add drives. There is a limitation, can’t recall where, that prevents either more than 2 drives on the internal or more than 200 gigs. One or the other. We needed the second PCI card to hook up the additional drives.

Be sure you have the patience (and extra cable) to route the ribbons so they don’t get squished or crimped and evaluate your power supply and cooling capacity. It’s easy to overload them by pulling too much juice to various systems like FW cards, big graphics cards and drives. If you back your Mac up against a wall you can restrict the circulation.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Ed Dooley]

SATA drives are the same size as ATA drives, so you can mount them in the same cages in the G4 as ATA drives. Instead of hooking up the computer’s ATA cables to them, buy a Tempo or SeriTek PCI SATA card and run the cables from the card to your drives. For more versatility get the SeriTek external SATA card and put your drives in an external enclosure.
Ed

[Stephen De vere]

Both ATA busses in MDD Macs support drives over 137GB.
I read a post, in “Mac OSX” I think, about a 5 internal drives setup in a dual G4 MDD – the fifth (system drive) under the Superdrive, connected to a Sonnet 100ATA PCI card.

[Ed Dooley]

The MDDs have 3 busses, one is 100, one is 66, and the optical buss is 33. Some folks have hooked up 4 drives and striped them across the faster busses, then installed a boot drive to the slow optical buss. The better solution is to hook up 2 drives to the internal ATA 100, and 2 drives to a PCI ATA100 card, leaving the ATA 66 buss for the boot drive. The ATA 33 buss is just too slow.
Ed

[Stephen de Vere] “Both ATA busses in MDD Macs support drives over 137GB.
I read a post, in “Mac OSX” I think, about a 5 internal drives setup in a dual G4 MDD – the fifth (system drive) under the Superdrive, connected to a Sonnet 100ATA PCI card.”

[Stephen De vere]

Ed,

You sound like you know what it’s all about – if you’ve got a moment to advise it would be much appreciated.

I’m in the proccess of upgrading storage for my MDD Dual G4/1.25 and plan to go SATA (on George Loch’s wise advice) and come up with this:

1/. Put in 3x 320GB SATA drives all connected to a SATA 4-port PCI card. Is this ok having them all on the same PCI slot ?

2/. The 80GB system drive and a 120GB drive are currently on the ATA66 channel. Where would you put and connect these two drives ? One on 100ATA bus and the other on the 66ATA ? Or shall I use the now ‘spare’ ATA133 RAID PCI card for the system drive ?

I’m preparing for my first DV50 online and don’t plan to need uncompressed realtime so I was not going to RAID stripe anything.