[nycitysteven]

I am about to get a Western Digital WD800JB hard drive.
I have a:
G4 450 AGP SAWTOOTH
705MB Ram
10 GB hd
I am wondering if I should make the new hard drive the slave or master, or if I should just keep one hd in the G4? Another qusetion is whether I should get a new ATA PCI card for speed., or if that does not matter in the case of my aging G4.

Danke, Steven

imagine peace

[D'Espice]

Since your G4 has an UDMA66 IDE-controller, a new ATA PCI card would do no good at all. And it doesn't matter whether it's slave or master or single, there won't be any difference in performance.

What you should do though is you should install OS X on your new harddrive. Mac OS X loves fast harddrives and the new one will probably be 3x as fast as your old 10GB harddrive.
By using CarbonCopyCloner you can also make a copy of your 10GB harddrive in order to avoid installing OS X from scratch.

[slider]

Originally posted by D'Espice:
Since your G4 has an UDMA66 IDE-controller, a new ATA PCI card would do no good at all. And it doesn't matter whether it's slave or master or single, there won't be any difference in performance.

What you should do though is you should install OS X on your new harddrive. Mac OS X loves fast harddrives and the new one will probably be 3x as fast as your old 10GB harddrive.
By using CarbonCopyCloner you can also make a copy of your 10GB harddrive in order to avoid installing OS X from scratch.

How do I find out how fast my QS is, do you know? It's the 867. Would I see speed improvements with say a 7200 drive, what about that 8MB cache, does that speed things up too? And this CarbonCopyCloner, can I assume that all I need to do is use it and copy my existing set up onto the new disk and I will be all set? Or is there more to it? I ask because this sounds like a fairly easy bump to do to my system, but is it worth the time and $$? Thanks.

[nycitysteven]

Originally posted by D'Espice:
By using CarbonCopyCloner you can also make a copy of your 10GB harddrive in order to avoid installing OS X from scratch.

Thanks for your help D'. The part i do not understand though is the CarbonCopyCloner. What is it and how do you use it? Sorry to sound so dumb , but if I make a copy of my hard drive now, will i put that on my new hd?...this must sound really dumb to you .

By the way i have changed my order and i am getting the WD1200JB 120GIG unit.

Steven

[11011001]

Originally posted by slider:
How do I find out how fast my QS is, do you know? It's the 867. Would I see speed improvements with say a 7200 drive, what about that 8MB cache, does that speed things up too? And this CarbonCopyCloner, can I assume that all I need to do is use it and copy my existing set up onto the new disk and I will be all set? Or is there more to it? I ask because this sounds like a fairly easy bump to do to my system, but is it worth the time and $$? Thanks.

Hrmm. I have the same computer as you. My stock drive was the 60 GB, and I thought it was 5400 RPM, though it might be 7200 RPM.

Anyways, I added one more hardrive into it after I got it. A 120 GB WD w/ 8 mb cache. But OS X on there, and it was noticeably faster. Boot times, file copying.. all that stuff. So ya, you will see an improvement.

I now have all my internal HDs on hardware RAID 0 (Sonnet Tempo RAID card). That is 2 120's, and 2 200's, both WDs with 8 mb of cache each. Now, this screams. It's just wicked fast. For those who don't know, RAID 0 turns a pair of HDs into one big HD. When data is written to this virtual HD, it's written to 2 HDs at the same time, improving performance consierably. Just imagining it, one would expect 2x's the performance, in reality though, it's like 1.5 or something like that, but it's a difference.

Not sure how much a difference cache makes, might help with smaller files.

I probably wouldn't upgrade your drive for speed alone, do it for capacity. A faster HD will speed things up though. As for money, you can pick up a 80 7200 Maxtor w 2m cace for like 130 CDN. A nice 200 GB Wester Digital w/ 8 mb cache will cost about 350 CDN (240 ish US). You'll likely get a bigger improvement in computer performance by getting more RAM, or upgrading you graphics card.

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by nycitysteven:
I am about to get a Western Digital WD800JB hard drive.
I have a:
G4 450 AGP SAWTOOTH

A lot of people can't sleep their Macs with the WD Special Edition drives (including myself.) If you're interested in this issue, check the reader reports at www.xlr8yourmac.com or Apple's own support forums. Just want to let you know of the issue before you buy.

[slider]

Pricegrabber.com; found the 7200, 120GB w/8MB cache for $107 US.

Do you have the sleep issue? Doe this sleep issue effect the 867QS?

What about this WD Raptor 10000RPM drive, 37.5GB 8MB cache?

How much difference does the cache make?

[D'Espice]

Originally posted by 11011001:
I now have all my internal HDs on hardware RAID 0 (Sonnet Tempo RAID card). That is 2 120's, and 2 200's, both WDs with 8 mb of cache each. Now, this screams. It's just wicked fast. For those who don't know, RAID 0 turns a pair of HDs into one big HD. When data is written to this virtual HD, it's written to 2 HDs at the same time, improving performance consierably. Just imagining it, one would expect 2x's the performance, in reality though, it's like 1.5 or something like that, but it's a difference.

Yeah that rocks, doesn't it? And one doesn't even need a RAID controller since OS X is capable of creating software RAID 0 or 1 stripesets. I got one of these, two 40GB Seagate Barracuda IV, 7200rpm... and it totally rocks.

slider:
According to Apple History both Quicksilvers, the 2001 as well as the 2002 model have an ATA66 controller, which means it's still fast enough for todays harddrives.
The stock harddrive is a 5400rpm harddrive, either IBM or Maxtor, hence it's definitely worth it to replace the stock harddrive with a new 7200rpm model.

nycitysteven:
CCC is a program to copy an existing OS X installation in order to prevent re-installing the OS after replacing the harddrive. It works like that: You put in your new harddrive, boot up OS X, partition and initialize the new harddrive then use CCC to copy your old system partition to a partition on your new harddrive.
Since there are plenty of hidden and system files the Finder does not copy, you have to use either CCC or the terminal equivalent "ditto", infact CCC is just the GUI for ditto.
When the job is done you gotta select the new system partition as boot-device (System Preferences) and reboot. You may also have to swap harddrives otherwise OS X might not boot however I'm not sure about that.

[nycitysteven]

OK, I think I get it, but.... can't I just leave my system 9.2.2 on my old hd and install sytem 10.x on the new one?

Another question completley off the subject...I am getting a lot of error type 2 and 11 and I just got a 1 also in MS Entourage and MS Word 2001. I've tried removing prefs, pram, rebuilt desktop, added memory, but nothing works. Entourage will open...sometimes, but Word starts to open and then quits. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Steven

[D'Espice]

Errr... you're still running OS 9? In that case you don't need CCC, you can simply copy the files. You can also leave OS 9 on your old harddrive and install OS X on the new harddrive.

[slider]

Thanks, D'Espice.

[slider]

Well, that was about as painless as it gets. Used CCC to clone my original drive to my new WD 120w/8MB cache, made that the master and the original drive a slave and erased it. No loss of data what so ever.

Now, how do I change the icon for my HD's ?