[G4] External Drive Case Firewire vs. USB 2

[Steve Goldstein]

At 9:11 AM -0500 8/2/06, Richard M. Kriss wrote:
>I am planning to buy an external hard drive enclosure for my spare Seagate
>80 GB SATA drive and the sellers really push the USB 2.0 interface rather
>than firewire for the enclosures.  I don' think a G4 will boot from a USB
>drive but understand the new Intel based Mac's will startup from a USB
>drive.  Can someone confirm the Intel Mac's will boot via a USB port?

I have read that they can, but have not done it myself.  I have an iMac Intel Duo, but my external is one of those made for Mac Minis (from OWC) with both USB 2.0 and FW interfaces, and I still use the FW interface.  But, inside is an IDE/ATA drive, and not a SATA drive.  You can get external SATA enclosures with both USB 2.0 and SATA interfaces, but I have not found any with FW interfaces.  My concern would be that USB booting is not officially supported by Apple (at least not to my knowledge), so there would be no guarantee that future versions of Mac OS X would support USB booting--maybe that should have read "future changes to the boot ROM firmware would not support USB booting."

>If I really wanted an external boot drive for this G4, I would look for a
>firewire drive; however, my wife's Dell Latitude XP Pro does not have a
>firewire interface. 

You can get an internal FW PCI card for less than $30.  I did just that for an older HP PC (which I just gave away to my daughter, because now I run Windows XP under Parellels Desktop right inside Mac OS X on my Intel iMac).  But, heck for 80 GB, why even bother?  They are so cheap, and your needs will almost certainly outstrip a partitioned 80 GB.

>I plan to partition the external drive to backup the
>Dell PC as well as personal files from this G4.  Anybody had success in
>using an external drive for both Mac and PC files?

Yes, but why?  I had a small 2.5" notebook drive that I had installed in an external USB case.  I had filled it mainly with photos from my Mac.  When I attached it to my PC I could see the contents.  Of course, I had formatted the drive in PC-readable format when it was connected to the Mac (G4 Quicksilver). 

>Also, any advantage to adding a software or hardware fix to have the G4 see
>more than 128 GB?  I have a Seagate 200 GB as my primary and a Western
>Digital 160 GB as the backup in this G4-1GHz-AGP and they are only half
>used.  The G4 thinks they are both 128 GB drives.

Yes, you can get an internal PC-133 bus PCI card (for the life of me, I cannot remember what they are called) that will recognize the full sizes of your HDs.  Unfortunately, the versions that work in a Mac cost about $50 (the PC versions are cheaper, but do not necessarily work in Macs).

--Steve