[G4] Much Ado About Harddrives

[Doug Burton]

On Jan 16, 2008, at 9:31 PM, Doug Burton wrote:

>
> On Jan 16, 2008, at 9:16 PM, John Niven wrote:
>
>> Just wondering...
>>
>> How do you get 4 drives in a DA? Do you use the dual
>> disk carrier, plus the other two single positions?
>>
>> I tried that once with 4 SCSI drives (small but
>> available :-). Maybe a coincidence, but the bottom one
>> on the dual carrier failed not long after. I think it
>> got too hot. Maybe modern SATA drives will be cooler,
>> but I thought you should watch out for that.
>>
>> John
>
> Actually I have 5 PATA drives (2 data drives + 2 backup drives + 1  
> OS drive)  in there now.  There are 3 spaces to mount HD carriers in  
> the bottom of the case and I have 2 drives on each end slot and one  
> in the middle slot.  As I said, the cable situation with IDE drives  
> is a nightmare, but they fit in that way just fine.  The computer  
> itself is in an unheated part of my house so over-heating has not  
> been a problem.  The computer has been operating in this present  
> mode since early last summer.  I have central A/C in the house so it  
> doesn't get warm in the summer either.  The whole reason I switched  
> to a DA for my file server was to get the gig ethernet and faster  
> bus speed.  I thought the Ultra 133 PATA card would be just fine,  
> but OWC and Acard has not been able to get it to work at Ultra  
> speed.  I had to use older 40 pin-40 conductor cables to even get  
> the drives recognized.  The increased SATA speed will hopefully fix  
> that problem and the smaller cables are just icing on the cake!

While looking around for a good buy I stumbled on this at Fry's:

http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4551377

While it would be totally cool to have over 2 Tb of HD space in my  
file server, I ended up ordering the 4 Seagate 300 Gb drives from  
NewEgg.  Seagate has a 5 year warranty where the Maxtor's is only 3  
years and with the free  shipping the total $$$ was a good bit less  
for the Seagates.  My present setup offers only 840 Gb of space so the  
upgrade in speed and 1.2 Tb of space will be significant enough to  
justify the cost.  At least I keep telling myself it is!

Just a message from Doug...