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GetSome681 · Jul 5, 2001, 09:55 AM

I have two IDE hard drives already in my G4. Is there any possible way of me putting in another drive without buying anything except for that drive? If there isn't, then I guess I'll just have to take one out... Any help would be greatly appreciated!

spicyjeff · Jul 5, 2001, 10:43 AM

You have a few options, none of which are easy as plug and play...

The G4 has two IDE busses. An ATA/66 bus which the hard drive is on and has an empty connector which it seems you already placed a drive on. The other is for the CD/DVD drive and the Zip drive. If you don't have a Zip drive you can place a hard drive on this connector but there are issues. First it will be slow since the IDE bus dor the CD/DVD drive is not even ATA/33 I believe. I think its ATAPI...which is something like 16mb/s max. (not exactly sure on that point, but it is slower) The second larger issue is heat...since the hard drive will literally just fit into the zip drive bay there is a very large possibility of the drive or machine over heating since it is not adequately cooled. You can see mods of this at XLR8YourMac.

The only real option for adding a third or more hard drive is to buy a PCI ATA controller card. You can pick up a nice ATA/66 controller card with two extra busses that will allow you to add up to four more drives for around $100 I think. Again, XLR8YourMac has some good reviews on cards and real world performance results compared.

Hope this helps.

Herr Newton · Jul 5, 2001, 08:32 PM

Originally posted by spicyjeff:
<STRONG>The second larger issue is heat...since the hard drive will literally just fit into the zip drive bay there is a very large possibility of the drive or machine over heating since it is not adequately cooled</STRONG>

It doesn't have to go in place of the Zip drive---he could also mount it in one of the two free bottom-mount spots right next to his other two drives. Of course that would require a longer ribbon to get down there, but it's quite workable.

That said, my suggestion is the same but with a slight modification: Buy an ATA/100 card, move the internal drives over to it, and run the new drives off of the internal ATA/66 bus. why? Depending on what revision of G4 he has, the OEM internal drive might very well be an ATA/100 drive.

Cipher13 · Jul 6, 2001, 12:07 AM

Take the fan off the side of the case, and pull one of the ribbons down - or attach an extension to the zip port.

If you wanna use one of the lower bays, that is.

I just stick the HD's in the zip bay - the ones I normally use in there are old 3800 rpm drives, and at fastest, 5200 rpm drives, which all run nice and cool. Haven't had any problems.