[G4] Swapping drives mirrored doors and FW800 dual processor G4s

[Tracker at aol.com]

True, you do not have to use the "Master" as the boot drive.

Just like SCSI, you can boot to either drive on the IDE ribbon or, if you 
have a supplementary card, you can boot from ANY drive as long as the drive has 
an active system installed and is attached to the motherboard and has power 
plugged into it.

The only advantage to having one drive on each bus is that you don't fill up 
the inside of the case and build up heat when they are all running. The 
biggest disadvantage is that you don't have the storage/working room on your hard 
drive(s) since there is a limit to the size of drive that will be recognized by 
the circuitry.

I believe the "visible limit" is around 160Gb on some machines unless you 
install an ATA 166 card. Then, you will be able to see the entire drive.

If your case has room for four drives, and that includes having the available 
power from the power supply, and you want or need that much drive space, then 
go ahead and install whatever you can afford. In that sort of situation, the 
number of drives is determined by the size of your needs and your wallet. For 
my personal needs, I have found that 100Gb is plenty. Maybe I will get into 
something that needs more room later on, but for right now and what I use my Mac 
for - I'm OK.

One weird thing I have found about IDE is that the speed of the slower device 
will affect the performance of the faster device and you can have only two 
devices on each ribbon. It is certainly NOT like using SCSI devices in that 
aspect, but it doesn't matter which drive is which as long as there is no conflict 
in the addressing. I personally like SCSI because it allows me to install up 
to 7 devices on each circuit and the speed doesn't take any hits from the 
attachments.

It's unfortunate that SCSI devices are so much more expensive than IDE, but 
you have to accept the economic fact that higher production rates equals lower 
unit costs and Big Brother Bill has flooded the world with his type of 
machine, so that type of device will be cheaper.