[G4] Options for adding disk space to Power Mac G4?

[John Niven]

Do you have an external firewire drive?

Very handy, also if you buy one you can always use it
for time machine backups if that works out for you.
Otherwise just use Carbon Copy Cloner.

I love CCC (I donated :-). Other options suggested
seem good but, for minimal investment, an external
firewire harddrive would seem to be best.

I would use CCC to copy the 10Gb Tiger partition to
the external harddrive. Once done check you can boot
from it (select it in startup disk from preferences).
Then you know you can always go back.

Clean install Leopard, wiping the Tiger partition.
Play with it, if your happy keep it, if not, boot from
the ext HD and use CCC to replace Tiger internally -
no harm done.

Whichever way you go, you can still use CCC to copy
your iTunes collection onto the ext HD and keep your
music safe.

John

--- Eric Smith <eric-s-smith at comcast.net> wrote:

> I have a Power Mac G4 ("Sawtooth" model) with these
> attributes:
> 1.0 GHz CPU (Sonnet upgrade)
> 1.3 GB RAM
> USB 2.0 card
> 2 internal ATA drives:
>   - 20 GB drive w/ two partitions, one has OS 9.2.2
> and the other
>     has 10.4.11
>   - 57 GB drive at this time mainly holds iTunes
> database
>     (~18 GB and growing slowly)
> 
> I want to install Leopard on this system, just
> because it's the
> latest and greatest and I want to play with it, and
> also to try
> out Time Machine. I would do an initial install and
> not disturb
> the contents of the 20 GB drive. My options as I see
> it are:
> 
> 1. Install Leopard on the 57 GB drive. Of course
> this is possible
> but I don't like the idea of the OS competing with
> the iTunes db
> for space; there may be sufficient now but
> eventually there will
> be a space problem, and backing up the db will be
> more difficult.
> 
> 2. Install Leopard on an external Firewire 400 or
> USB 2.0 drive.
> I think this would suffer in performance vs. an
> internal drive,
> since this machine has ATA/66.
> 
> 3. Put the iTunes db on an external drive and use
> the 57 GB drive
> just for Leopard. This could be done, if the
> external drive has
> enough performance to stream iTunes (probably not a
> problem).
> It would seem a little inconvenient to have to have
> the external
> drive powered up every time iTunes was used though.
> 
> 4. Replace the 57 GB drive with a 120 GB drive, and
> partition it,
> say 40 GB for Leopard and 80 for iTunes.
> Unfortunately there is a
> 128 GB limit for drives on this system, unless a
> third-party driver
> is used - and from what I understand that is not
> without problems.
> 
> 5. Add another internal drive to the system.
> Unfortunately here,
> two ATA drives is the maximum. Another drive would
> require a PCI
> controller card for ATA/133, SATA, or SCSI, and
> probably some
> mounting brackets, etc. While this would offer the
> best performance
> it is definitely the most expensive option, and
> there's still that
> 128 GB limit.
> 
> I'm leaning toward 3 or 4, but I thought I would put
> it out to the
> list to see if anyone has an opinion on the
> advantages vs. tradeoffs,
> or any ideas of other options that I have missed.
> 
> Thanks,
> Eric
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>
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