Well of course it just blows me away how helpful you guys are. I've posed maybe 4 questions here over the last year and gotten solid, considered advice. Thanks. The reason I want to replace one of the drives (maybe both if cheap enough without losing speed) is, I think one may be about to crater. I'm running OS 9 on one and Panther on the other. I've seen some unexplained slowing of the performance (although it's only at 1/2 capacity) and a few times when running under the Panther drive, the OS 9 drive failed to show up on the desktop. I've run disk utility and Tech Tool Deluxe. I'll be dropping the OS 9 soon, but I like having the ability to go back to old software that I don't think I can upgrade or export (I've been running my photo biz on Macs since ''87). So, I was thinking I should just spend $50 and replace the suspect drive (or both). I just didn't think I could simply order any old IDE drive from Dealmac and plug and play. Will I need to buy a different ribbon for that option? ~And more importantly (I use this machine for retouching on Photoshop CS), is there going to be a drop in performance moving from the 7200 SCSI drive to an IDE? Perhaps this is a basic question, but I'm not familiar with either the terminology or differences in drives and controllers. Thanks again, ~Jay On Jan 3, 2007, at 5:57 PM, John Niven wrote: > 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 > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > G4 mailing list > G4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com > http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/g4 > > Listmom is trying to clean out his closets! Vintage Mac and random > stuff: > http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZmacguy1984