G4 Yikes and sawtooth adding and up grade hard drives

[csean at poc.it]

on 03/02/2004 13:57, Power Macintosh G4 List at G4 at lists.themacintoshguy.com
wrote:

> On G 400 yikes and G 400 sawtooth. It seems that you can keep using
> the existing hard drive on these macs add a pci controler in the slot
> and then add a new ata hard drive. Correct? Then the 2 drive work as one
> correct? Please correct me if I am wrong. Then on the new drive, because
> apple doesn't support 3 party, firmware, I know just an excuse but when
> I have called with problems in the past it's easy to blame 3 party, so I
> am looking for some kind of 80 gig. 120 gig.etc apple drive, got any
> ideas. Or what drive would be a close copy of and apple drive. And what
> about the pci controler where and do they cause any conflicts. I have a
> G4 400 yikes with a 10 gig that in the biggest need and my main one. I
> also have a G4 500 sawtooth with a 27gig that I just got and might start
> using it, my only problem is I am not sure how used it is. Dors mutiple
> hard drive and pci controler have any reliability problems.
> 

Darryl,

On both G4's you can add a second drive without needing an ATA controller
card; the ATA card lets you add a third (or even fourth, though this
requires some internal creativity) and, as you wrote, lets you create a RAID
out of 2 drives; though some people question the value of RAIDs today, now
that huge hard drives are so cheap.
I have a 40GB and an 80GB HD in my G4 Sawtooth, both of which are Western
Digital drives. Prices are coming down and I can recommend the Western
Digital 8MB cache drives, though take a look at xlr8yourmac dot com for
reports on other brands. IIRC, I got a 3 year warranty on the Western
Digital 80GB drive, which is good for peace of mind.

My only experience with a PCI ATA controller was the VST Ultratek ATA/66,
which I used in my G3 Yosemite. It worked fine. It is still being sold on
ebay and the LEM swap list, for anywhere from $20 to $40; firmware was
released not too long ago making it compatible with Jaguar (don't know about
Panther). It's an interesting option, especially since many people have
written that hard drives don't gain much from going from an ATA/66 card to
an ATA/133. Again, xlr8 is a priceless resource for hard drives and PCI
controllers. They even provide illustrated instructions for adding 2nd and
3rd drives, setting the drive to Master or Slave, installing PCI cards, etc.

Good luck.

Chris