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

[Eric Smith]

Just an update on the results of the upgrade. Thanks to the advice
I received on this forum I ordered a SATA controller and 300 GB
SATA drive from OWC and installed it in place of the 20 GB ATA
drive, after copying its contents with Carbon Copy Cloner. All went
smoothly with one minor exception - because there is no driver for
OS 9, I am not able to boot OS 9 from the SATA drive. Not that I
have any need to, but it's too bad to lose a previous capability.
For now I will leave the 57 GB ATA drive connected, and possibly
replace it with another SATA drive in the future.

Now to see how Leopard performs on this beast.

Eric

Eric Smith 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