[mememe]

Hey everyone

Im needing to buy about 30-40GB of external storage for a Beige G3 system. right now it has a 5yr old SCSI external drive that is on the fritz and is ready to be recycled

This mac is networked (100Base) to 5 other macs (all are newer G4s) this mac is mostly used for light quark work but with very large graphics (hence the need for more storage) we will be upgrading this mac to a new G4 but not until next year, so my question is shoudl I buy a SCSI external drive for this machine or get a Firewire PCI card & a firewire external drive.

when we get the new machines the entire network will be 1000Base, don't know if that matters much

If i go with the SCSI what type should I get, as the SCSI on this model is built in.

Thanks for any advice

[BTP]

I think you should look at www.xlr8yourmac.com to see the differences between SCSI and Firewire. They also cover the PCI IDE cards too. That is one you didn't mention.

External Firewire is nice because it is portable and like the IDE PCI cards, allows you to use all those cheap and fast IDE drives, like the Deskstar 60GXP. Personally, I wouldn't go with SCSI on price/storage ratios, $115 for a 40GB drive, shipped. I'd look at Firewire or the PCI IDE card.

I just posted below how to convert my Firewire 3.5 to a 5.25, but I don't think I'll do that. I'll probably put it up on ebay, but if you want to go firewire, let me know and I'll sell you mine at a good price. (It has the Texas Instruments chipset on the IDE to Firewire bridge, supposed to be good.)


The PCI IDE cards are now up to ATA/100 from the ATA/66, running about $129 and $99, respectively. The ATA/100 cards are not widely available yet, you may have to look. The Firewire option involves getting a PCI Firewire card and the external enclosure. Those can run all over the place in price. Again, see xlr8yourmac.com for the best info on this.

Hope this helps.

[Paul S]

I'd say external FireWire all the way. Once you upgrade, you won't need to add SCSI to your G4 to use another drive. FW would just transfer right over. If you plan to sell your older beige unit, it would probably sell easier with a FW card anyway.

[misc]

Originally posted by Paul S:
<STRONG>I'd say external FireWire all the way. Once you upgrade, you won't need to add SCSI to your G4 to use another drive. FW would just transfer right over. If you plan to sell your older beige unit, it would probably sell easier with a FW card anyway.</STRONG>

I agree. I think you should keep boot on the scsi drive, and have all of your storage on your firewire drive. If your network is down, or you want to move data to a computer that isn't on the network then all you have to do is unplug the HD.

[CMYKid]

ditto....we farm out files to 40 lab machines from two Maxtor 80 Gig Firewire drives that are on our ASIP server. Great transfer rates compared to the other drives on that machine...

also...you mentioned that with your new machines the whole network will be 1000BT...remember, you hafta getta 1000 Base hub or switch to do that, if you have em linked with non-1000 hardware there's ni speed diff...also, if you're only working on a peer to peer network as opposed to a server-based one, i really doubt you'll get the full bandwidth of 1000Bt between machines... mail me ifya happen to have ?'s

:ryan