[Hobbit_Boy]

I am going to be leaving for college in a year or so, and I am planning on saving up all summer to buy a new computer. By then im sure that the Moto/IBM/Apple issue will be sorted out and I will have a new mac. My question is as follows;

What is the largest storage sollution for the Mac? I have seen ads for the "SanCube" and large 70bg IBM SCSI hard drives. Someone suggested setting them up in a RAID array? What is that?

I have a complex with storage space. I love bragging about my storage space. I love being able to say that I have 15gb of music and another 50 gb of movies all on my computer. Idealy I would like to download the entire college network (all the files and webpages) onto my hard drive for quick access and bragging rights...essentially turning my mac into a huge server.

I know that these storage sollutions do not come cheap..I have about $3,000 to spend on hard drives or whatever. I know that DVD RAM is probably the cheapest mass storage sollution....

Is there any way to get a terabyte of storage on the mac? Will MacOS even recognize that much storage? Oh...the bragging rights I would have to all the PC users with a terabyte or storage...ohhh....*salivating*...

Anyone have any ideas, or setups that might offer some sort of sollution to my problem?

[Evangellydonut]

Largest storage solution to be avilable in a month: Maxtor's harddrive...20GB/platter, 4 platters, making it 80GB/HD. Problem being its only 5400 RPM.
Largest and fast solution: IBM Deskstar 75GXP. 15GB/platter, 5 platters, making it 75GB/HD. Problem with it being so big is head alignment is difficult, making it slower than the 45GB model, but its 7200RPM and ATA/100, thus will be much faster than the Maxtor HD.

For RAID information in detail, refer to the following arstechnica article: http://arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html
The article should be indepth enough for a beginner. When people say RAID, they generally mean RAID 0, and in some cases, 1.

With $3k to spend on HD, I recall this one company that makes RAID IDE HDs that connects to your computer using FireWire...problem with IDE in general, is one controller is limited to 4 devices, and your G4 will come with at least a DVD and one internal HD. DVD-RAM is nice...but in a year, there'll probably be some new technology that can store much more...in the mean time, I like them 2.6 GB Orb drives...

At current prices, 1,000/75 = 13.xxx, meaning you'll need 3 more IDE controllers, an external case to put all the HDs, and 13 Deskstars will cost oh, $7,000...a bit out of your price range...I suggest looking into 100GB Raid5 storage, which is 'bout the fastest thing out there, but not as massive as you'd want it to be...Even that'll probably be out of your price range since fast RAID setups generally use 15,000 RPM SCSI, which is rather expensive...

[This message has been edited by Evangellydonut (edited 08-23-2000).]

[Hobbit_Boy]

Hm...I was thinking about getting a ton of external SCSI Hard drives...I suppose with this RAID thing they could all be linked together and function as one BIG HD..interesting. Like you mentioned, it gets spendy FAST...

[Evangellydonut]

Remember, if you RAID several SCSIs, better use RAID5, else if 1 of the drives fail, all data will become useless and un-recoverable!

[Paul S]

Check out Proline's (www.proline.com) internal expansion unit for G3/G4. For $14 you can add 2 more hard drives above the DVD. The G4 has 8 drive bays total with this. 4 on the bottom, the DVD, Zip, and 2 with the Proline unit. The built-in controller will handle 4 UltraATA/66 drives, so you will need another IDE controller card ($88 for Sonnet's Tempo card at Buy.com).

I agree on the recommendation of the IBM drives because the 7200rpm speed will perform much better than the 5400rpm of the Maxtor. I have seen those drives online for about $520 each. If you don't get the internal Zip, you have 6 open drive bays in that machine plus your original hard drive. You can get 5 drives, the IDE card, and the expansion unit for about $2700 giving you 375GB plus your original drive.

If you want more expansion than that, look into the EasiExpansion T35 from Mobility Electronics (www.mobilityelectronics.com). It is an external chasis for $600 that has 3 PCI slots, 2 USB ports, and 5 drive bays, with a 4 drive IDE controller. You will need another IDE card for the last bay, but this would bring your total number of drives to 12, or 900GB if they are all 75GB drives. This would cost you another $3800 for the chasis, card and 6 drives (1 for the last bay in the G4).

While IDE isn't as fast as SCSI, it is significantly cheaper. The IBM drives can sustain 34-37GB/s transfer rate which should be fast enough for your purposes.