[bbales]

I have been considering purchasing another hard drive and am considering a second internal, for my gigabit ethernet G4 tower, purchased in late 2000. I do have a FW already, to augment my puny 20 GB internal HD!

But a couple questions. First, do I just get an IDE/ATA drive -- that is the one that will work with my G4, correct? Not one of the serial ATA drives? The one I have is 5,400 speed -- but newer ones are 7,200. Is that a problem?

I'm considering the Seagate, b/c of reputation and warranty, primarily. I am wondering, though, if the internal is the smart choice monetarily. B/c of the age of this machine, I'll be limited to 120 GB. You get more for less with the bigger drives, it seems. Certainly that's the case if I ever decide to put it in an enclosure. And, finally, if I decide to purchase an internal drive and then pop it in an enclosrue, how easy is that, really? People say it's a snap, but is it?

Any insight would be much appreciated.

[Luca Rescigno]

Yes, if you want a new or an extra internal hard drive, IDE/ATA is the way to go. Generally these drives are listed as either IDE, ATA/100, or sometimes ATA/133. You should definitely get a 7200 RPM hard drive with 8 MB of cache. 5400 RPM drives are not only rare these days, but they're really only useful if you want to absolutely squeeze every extra penny from the price, or if you want something with lower heat and power consumption. Not worth it for a tower that's already somewhat loud and has reasonably good ventilation.

Seagate has a great warranty, five years. Most companies have three year warranties. Then again, Seagate tends to cost a bit extra.

If you want to surpass the 120 GB limit, and get a nice, large, fast, and modern hard drive for your G4, you do have the option of buying a Serial ATA PCI card. Macsales.com has a number of them in stock, the least expensive of which costs slightly under $60. The main advantage is that you can take advantage of the low price per GB at the very high capacities. 200-300 GB hard drives are now down to about 50 cents per GB, versus 70 or 80 cents on the smaller 80-160 GB drives. The only thing is you'll be spending a lot more up front, and basically your only big advantage will be that you can use larger hard drives. If you don't need more than 120 GB, then I don't see the reason to get a S-ATA card.

[MORT A POTTY]

I'd suggest a Firmtek SATA controller PCI card w/ a 200(minimum)GB HD. I have a Seagate SATA 200GB HD in my Quicksilver with the Sonnet SATA controller which is a rebranted Firmtek card... I love it. faster than the ATA/66 controller that is built-in to the machine and it supports larger drives.

the RPMs don't matter in terms of compatibility. 7200 is the standard for desktop HDs. 10,000 RPM drives are becoming more common as the capacities increase, but they are being mainly used as boot volumes.

in short, I suggest an SATA PCI card w/ a large HD.