[G4] Question about Firewire enclosure / hard drive

[Robert MacLeay]

On Tue, 29 May 2007 22:24:06 -0500, "Michelle" <happydog at northmo.net> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Please forgive the newbie question, but my G4 "Sawtooth" needs more
> hard drive space and my current arrangement is just entirely too slow
> (using a LaCie "Brick" USB external drive.) The "Brick" is fine for
> backing up files, photos, etc - but is way too slow to use for much
> of anything else.
> 
> I am just now learning what exactly a "Firewire Enclosure" even IS...
> and what it would/could do in my situation. It sounds like a
> reasonable route to go, for additional hard drive space at a faster
> speed than the LaCie external drive.
> 
> My question to you all is - if I buy the enclosure "thing"... (I
> found some on some respected Mac websites, am thinking about one made
> by "MacAlly") - where do I then purchase the actual hard drive to go
> inside the thing? How much would I expect to pay for the actual
> drive? The website says that the MacAlly enclosure "Supports any
> capacity 3.5" ATA (IDE) Hard Drive"... but I have no idea where to go
> buy such a thing.
> 
> Any suggestions would be great.

Hello, Michelle

You seem to be thinking in terms of adding storage only through an external
hard drive.  

You should understand that there is a huge performance penalty for going
this route as opposed to adding another internal hard drive to your Mac.  In
tests I conducted using my Blue & White, a drive in an external FW/USB case
ran only 2% (USB 1.1) to 30% (USB 2.0) to 42% (FW400) as fast as the same
drive mounted internally.  Since OS X is so disk-intensive, this will
strongly affect your user experience.

Consider also that your current internal hard disk is probably 7 years old.
Hard disks do wear out. The best come with only 5 year warranties, and the
garden variety only 3 years. It would be prudent to purchase a bare hard
drive from a place such as OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/) as a
replacement for your original drive, and use it as your boot disk.  The
original drive (assuming it is worth keeping) can be placed in an external
enclosure and used as a backup, and will last a whole lot longer in an
external case which is powered up only once a month.

Some gotchas to consider:
*The caveat in your case is that the Sawtooth can only use a maximum of 128
GB of drive space, so you are limited in how large a drive you can buy.
(There are ways around this limit, but they involve hacks which can cause
you Big Trouble down the line.)
*USB 2.0, unless you are willing to spring for a hardware upgrade (an add-in
PCI card), is not available to you.
* While you can boot from an external FW drive, a Sawtooth cannot boot off
USB.
* Depending on your budget, and on how long you intend to use this Mac,
consider purchasing a separate SATA PCI card and SATA (instead of the
natively supported (P)ATA) hard drive.   The drives cost the same, but the
card will add $50+ to your purchase cost.  Your disk access will jump,
according to my own tests, an additional 10% to 50%, and you can use, and
boot off, any size HD you want.