[G4] Internal Hard Drive compatibility for AGP

[John Niven]

Jay,

You can fit three drives to your G4 so there is no
need to lose one.

As you have spent money on a CPU upgrade (not my first
choice), you should upgrade your disk(s). There are
two factors 1) rotational speed and 2) data transfer
rate. 

The motherboards built-in interface is only ATA33
which is slow by todays standards though modern,
faster drives will be backwards compatable. You will
be limited to 128Gb even if the drive is bigger.
However, it's still an advantage to have a high
rotational speed. Make sure it's 7200rpm. It will
"feel" more responsive.

So you could add a third 128Gb for the cost of the
drive and a ribbon cable.

Are you using OSX? If you are, you should use the disk
utility to create a RAID 0 (stripe) array with your
two 18G drives, and then put your OS on that array.
You get what appears to be a 36Gb drive that is ~
double the speed and free! 

Next up the investment scale you can add a Sonnet
Serial ATA PCI card to hook up a >128Gb SATA drive.
This works very well for me with a Maxtor 250Gb SATA
drive providing the mass storage.

However you can also just rip out your current scsi
devices and use the one SATA drive - I get comparable
read/write times between my SATA drive and a striped
pair of U160 SCSI drives that run from a ATTO UL3D pci
card.

Don't buy an Airport card, buy a wireless G PCI card.
I have one by Belkin that works with OSX out the box.
You might be running out of PCI slots now ... :-)

John

--- JayB <FromJay at joimail.com> wrote:

> I've looked back through 6 mos of archive and read
> the specs at  
> 'lowendmac.com' but still don't feel l have
> confidence in knowing  
> what I can buy to upgrade the internal drives in my
> G4/500 AGP  
> (upgraded to an Sonnet ST 1ghtz).  It has factory
> 2x18 Ultra2 SCSI /  
> Dual card drives.
> 
> My question is- can I buy pretty much any IDE drive
> to replace one or  
> both the internals?  I know about the 128mb max. 
> But I just want to  
> upgrade (cheaply) to larger drives without suffering
> speed (I thought  
> the 7200 ultras were supposed to be the fastest). 
> Specific  
> suggestions and sources would be much appreciated.
> 
> Also, are airport cards for older g4s like mine
> available?  (since I  
> have a wireless router already in use for my
> laptop).
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> ~Jay


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