[schwachs]

A friend is selling an old G3 Blue and White... I would like to use this as my mp3 music server for my house...

Can you tell him how large of a hard drive I can put into one of these babies?


Thanks!

[Luca Rescigno]

Technically you can put up to a 120 GB hard drive in it and it'll be recognized to full capacity. However, the IDE controllers on the B&W G3s are not only slow, but also somewhat buggy. It would be a better idea to buy an ATA controller card (make sure it's Mac compatible) and put a hard drive on that. If you get an ATA card, you can get any size ATA hard drive.

[Cadaver]

The rev. 1 blue & white G3s had the buggy ATA controller (supports only one drive). The revision 2 machines have a much better controller, which would also accept a secondary ATA drive.

However, either revision is only ATA/33 spec, so they're slow compared to modern controllers and they are limited to capacities less than 133GB.

A Mac-compatible PCI UltraATA controller would allow installation of up to 4 drives on a fast ATA/133 controller, easily supporting high-speed 250+GB drives. There are also hardware ATA-RAID cards available, though probably overkill for a music server.

I have an ACard UltraATA controller in my blue & white rev. 1 G3 (with a 900MHz G3 ZIF upgrade). The UltraATA card and a 7200rpm 8MB cache 80GB drive makes a huge difference in boot/load/save speed.

I bought the controller card from OtherWorld Computing for something like $109.

[Abit667]

I think the rev 2s still have a buggy IDE controller. I had a rev 2 B&W and I couldn't get a 120 gig WD SE to work properly or a 60 gig seagate to work right. It recognized them, and it mounted them for a while, but sometimes it would unmount it and you could never remount the drive again unless you formatted it and then it just got messed up again. I could never install OSX on those discs either. I got an ATA card for it and it worked perfect. Plus, like it has been said the onboard controller is only ATA33, which isn't really much of a problem for network storage since that isn't going any faster then 6Mb/s, but its still pretty slow.
I would get a controller card if you want to do what you want reliably.

[tooki]

I haven't had any trouble with the internal ATA controller in my Rev B B&W. It is well-documented that the Rev A has problems. Problems with Rev B's are decidedly rare -- it's more likely that your individual unit has a faulty controller or other motherboard defect, but that is not representative of the model.

Anyway, schwachs: for a music server, I think that an ATA card is overkill (Yes, it'd be faster. Would you notice the difference on an MP3 server? Not bloody likely.) Unless you have a Rev A, in which case an ATA card is inevitable.

tooki