[X-Newbies] Backup strategy needed

[Randy B.Singer]

Mark Taintor said:

>I have a G4/533 running 10.2.8. 1 gig ram.

W Lane said:

>Bear in mind that  
>your machine will 'see' only up to 128gig of HD space. In other  
>words, if you install a 250gig HD, it will work, but will appear as  
>128gig.

That is correct, but it only applies if you add an additional internal 
drive and connect it to the already existing IDE bus.

Older Mac's ROM's only support 32-bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing), and 
support of greater than 128 GB for internal hard drives requires 48-bit 
LBA and OS X 10.2 or later.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86178
Mirrored drive doors G4's and later (and some of the later QuickSilvers 
too) can do 48-bit logical block addressing.  Earlier Macs cannot.

There are three ways you can access the full capacity of an internal 
drive over 128GB if your model of Mac doesn't natively support 48-bit 
LBA.  

1)You can use a third-party (non-Apple) software driver
or
2)You can install an IDE PCI card to give you a 48-bit internal IDE bus
or 
3)You could put your drive into a FireWire hard drive case kit (assuming 
that the kit uses a recent FireWire to IDE bridge chip.)

Note that partitioning your hard drive will not allow you to access more 
than a total of 128GB.

Intech's ATA Hi-Cap Support Driver software ($25) allows the use of 
extended capacity ATA drives (drives greater than 128 Gigabytes in size) 
on older (Pre-Mirrored Door) G4 and some G3 Macintoshes running MacOS X 
versions 10.2 and later.  

Some Mac-compatible UATA/100 PCI cards can support 48-bit LBA, and, to my 
knowledge, *all* Mac-compatible UATA/133 PCI cards support this feature 
as well.  Sonnet's Tempo UATA/100 supports 48-bit LBA. 

SIIG has a Mac compatible ATA/133 PCI card available for $69 with free 
shipping from Buy.com if you want to upgrade to be able to access your 
drive's extra capacity.
<http://www.buy.com/prod/SIIG_Storage_controller_ATA_133_133_MBps_PCI/q/loc
/101/10325653.html>
(This is the best deal on a Mac-compatible UATA/133 card that I've seen.)

The SIIG card supports 48-bit LBA:
http://www.siig.com/products/ide/features/UltraATA133_100Pro.html





Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html