[X4U] Where to put a 3rd hard drive?

[Randy B.Singer]

Crandon David said:

>I have a DP500 Gigabit Ethernet G4.
>
>I already have two hard drives attached to the same bus.
>
>I'd like to add a 3rd, and from what I understand it would be connected 
>to the same bus as the DVD-ROM drive. Is this correct?
>
>Does the DVD-ROM drive already have a cable that will connect two 
>drives (like the main hard drive cable) or do I have to get a new 
>cable? And do I have to do the master-slave thing (this computer does 
>not support cable select)?


If you have two drives on the mail IDE bus in your Mac, then the only 
other IDE bus left is the one for the DVD-ROM.  I don't know how fast 
that bus is in your particular Mac, but typically it is slower than the 
bus your hard drive is on, and it doesn't support 48-bit LBA, so you 
can't use all of a hard drive that is larger than 128GB attached to it..

It would be a much better idea to attach a third hard drive to an IDE PCI 
card (assuming that you have a free PCI slot.)

SIIG has a Mac compatible ATA/133 card available for $68.11 with free 
shipping from Buy.com:
<http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10325653&loc=>
(This is the best deal on a Mac-compatible UATA/133 card that I've seen.)
This card supports 48-bit logical block addressing, so you can use a 
drive larger than 128GB.

And, yes, if your Mac doesn't support cable-select, you have to set one 
disk as the master and the other as the slave.  The drives that you 
purchase will more than likely have either instructions that come with 
them to tell you how to set the jumpers, or the instructions will be 
right on the drive, or both.

Be sure to get a high-speed 80-conductor (40-pin) IDE cable (i.e. *not* a 
40-conductor cable) if the drive or the IDE card doesn't come with one.  



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