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 >> _______________________________________________ >> G4 mailing list >> G4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com >> http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/g4 > > _______________________________________________ > G4 mailing list > G4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com > http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/g4