[G4] G4 Yikes and sawtooth adding and up grade hard drives

[Alex]

On Monday, Feb 2, 2004, at 23:10 Canada/Eastern, Darryl Mueller wrote:

> [...] 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. [...]

Are you talking RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) or are you 
just talking about adding a second hard drive? From the tone of your 
message, I suspect the latter. If that is so, then relax. Yes, you can 
add a second hard drive in either or both of your two machines. You 
don't need additional ATA controllers, unless you plan to add hard 
drives larger than 128GB. You don't need to worry about 3rd party 
firmware; virtually any consumer-level hard drive should work. The 
second drive will appear as a separate drive.

If you want to have both drives appear as a single large drive, then 
you're talking RAID. Since your original drives are 10GB and 27GB 
respectively, RAID doesn't make much sense. On the contrary, for your 
setup, keeping the drives separate makes good sense, since you can 
install system software on the smaller drives and use them as emergency 
boot devices.

f