[G4] 1.25 MDD Hard Drive Replacement?

[Harry Freeman]

Greetings Jonny,

FW 800 is an Okay way to go except AFAIK all of the FW enclosures take  
IDE/ATA drives and as you have stated, the newer faster big drives are  
SATA. I don't want to speak for Ron but I think that what he means is  
get a PCI Card that has a connection for an external SATA drive. This  
is a good way to go but I would recommend that first you go to http://groups.google.com/ 
  and join the "LEM SWAP" Low End Mac Swap group and post a Want add  
for a PCI SATA card. Thats where I got mine, however the one that I  
got doesn't have a connection for an external drive. Therefore the  
SeaGate 750Gb drive that I have is mounted in an external case that is  
a SATA to  USB and is not that fast. The next short coming is that USB  
is not bootable for the G4 platform.

Internal I have (count em) 2 SATA, 2 ea. 500Gb (Samsung, Seagate) =  
1Tb and 2 ea. 120Gb (Western Digital & Maxtor) = 240Gb for a total of  
1.24Tb internal and external I have the SATA 750Gb Seagate, a Maxtor  
300Gb and a 80Gb Samsung. All external drives are connected via USB.  
The external case that the Maxtor 300Gb can be connected via FW but my  
1999 G4 only has FW400 and I have a PCI card that does USB 2.0 which  
is faster than FW 400.

I have an ACARD SATA, PCI which I got through LEM SWAP for $25.00 in  
November '08

Cheers

Harry
San Jose, Ca
----------------------------------------------------

On Mar 22, 2010, at 10:17 AM, jonny wrote:

> Thanks, Ron.  Are you suggesting no internal hard drives, only  
> external via FW 800?  Is there a downside to this?  That is, do I  
> want to have one internal HD or can I do this without any internal  
> hard drives in the MDD?
>
> I like the idea of limiting the load on the power supply by using  
> drives externally with their own power supplies.  Anything that will  
> help me avoid this problem again is most welcome.
>
> Thanks.
>
> jonny
>
>
>> This past weekend Fry's had Seagate 1 Terabyte SATA bare drives for
>> $77. Why not get the most bang for your dollars? I'd get a card from
>> Other World Computing along with one or two of their external
>> enclosures. If you want to maximize the life of you G4 I'd strongly
>> suggest not putting the HDs back inside. As we've all discovered the
>> power supply is a definite weak link in this box and you'd be well
>> served by doing as much as you can to limit the load on it.
>>
>> FWIW,
>> Ron
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>
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