[X4U] What type of drive will work?

[Jeff Carruthers]

On May 9, 2008, at 7:47 AM, Dan A. Currie wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> My MDD DUAL 1.25 MHz / 2 GB RAM / 120 GB and 200 GB HD / NETSCAPE  
> 7.2 / OS X.4.11 is losing one of its drives.
>
> According to the manual it can handle 6 drive / storage devices.  
> The 2 ATA / 100 bays and the 2 Optical bays are filled but the 2  
> ATA / 66 bays are empty.
>
> My question is will an ATA / 100 storage drive work in one of the  
> ATA / 66 bays?  I would like to put a 300 GB ATA / 100 dstorage  
> drive in one of the bays.
The simple answer is no. If you put the ATA100 drive into the ATA66  
bay, it will not see all of the contents of the drive (the maximum  
for ATA66 is 125 Gb, I believe). If you have two 125 GB drives, you  
could temporarily put the 300 GB ATA100 drive into the second ATA100  
bay and move files to the new drives in the ATA66 bay. If the drive  
is full, you'd still lose some files.

The alternative is to get an external firewire enclosure for the 300  
GB drive. External cases bought whould support the larger drives.

There are also PCI cards that will add a higher-speed ATA controller  
to your Mac (you'd put the drives in the two lower bays and connect  
them to the PCI card), but I have found that they are not always  
reliable with the newer versions of Mac OS X.

Hope this helps.

Jeff

>
> Thank you,
>
> Dan A. Currie, Jr.

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