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What happens when only 120 GB of a 250 GB firewire drive is shown?
Hi Group
I recently posted the following question: “What problems will I be facing in operating a G4 733 with OS X?”
Phil Baldson posted “You may find it will only support a 120Gb external firewire hard drive though (or only see 120Gb on a larger drive).”
Has anyone experienced this problem?
If so, how did you resolve it?
Has anyone heard of Intech/Speedtools.com?
Their website has the following:
“The Intech ATA Hi-Cap Support Driver software was created to allow the use of extended capacity ATA drives (drives greater than 128 Gigabytes in size) on older (Pre-Mirrored Door) G4 and G3 Macintoshes running MacOS X versions 10.2 and later. Without this software installed, any extended capacity drive which is connected to the native ATA bus on older Macintosh models will be limited to only 128 Gigabytes. Later model G4’s and all G5’s do not suffer from this limitation.”
Has anyone tried this driver and does it really work?
Howie
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5 Replies
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Addendum: The website is Intechusa.com … The driver they have avilable is Speedtools.
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I have 3 LaCie FW drives, the smallest being a 250 gig, all running on a DP G4 800 without any problems at all. I would suspect you’d be in the same boat with your G4. As far as intenal ATA drives go, I think that’s where you’d run into problems with the G4 not seeing any more on those drives than 128 gigs because of the 32bit addressing. At least that’s how i’ve come to understand it.
– Don
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Don
Thanks for the feedback.
Which LaCies are those? Do they have built-in fans?
What OS are you running?
Howie
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Everything you asked for is in my bio.
– Don
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As others have stated, you should be fine with any size external firewire drive. The limitation applies when adding an internal ATA drive. The workaround I used is to buy a PCI ATA card, and connect the drive internally to that bus. Certain models of G4’s only support up to 120 gb on the apple ATA bus. I haven’t tried the driver you mentioned.
Matt Lyon
CORE Feature Animation
Toronto
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