[Kikaida]

Fellow Mac geeks:
in the next few days, I'll be ordering a new internal HD for my 933mhz Quicksilver 2002. The tower currently houses 2 drives: a 30 gig drive I pulled from an external enclosure(the enclosure died) and the stock 60 gig drive,which is my boot drive. I'd like to add a third HD, which I think I can do based upon Apple's specs. I have a few questions for the group that I need answered before I proceed:

1. Are interface specs important? I've been browsing various drives which list different ATA interface specs like ATA-100, ATA-66 and ATA 133. The Apple website lists my computer's drive as being "Ultra ATA". Will any of the aforementioned ATA drives work in my machine?

2. Has anyone had success installing 3 drives in a Quicksilver tower? If it's going to require more than plugging in drives after mounting them into their brackets, I may just get an external FW HD.

You reply is greatly appreciated.

[Luca Rescigno]

Your Quicksilver has two internal ATA buses - one ATA/33 (for the optical drive and zip drive, if present) and one ATA/66 (for the hard drives). The ATA/66 controller in the Quicksilver 2002 and later can handle any size hard drive. However, each ATA bus is limited to two devices. Theoretically, you could install a third hard drive under the optical drive on the ATA/33 bus. But ATA/33 is extremely slow, and you will not like it. If you want to install more than two hard drives, I would suggest getting either a controller card or a firewire enclosure. If you get a controller card, you may as well get a Serial ATA one, which is faster and more future-proof.

Anyway, 120 GB hard drives are excellent deals these days - around $90. If you want plenty of storage, just pick up one of those and put it in a Firewire case. You can certainly go for internal storage, but controller cards cost more than Firewire cases, so if you don't mind having an external case, it's the cheaper option.

[Kikaida]

Luca,
Thanks for your reply. Knowing this, I'll probably stick with an external.

[Eriamjh]

The ATA33 bus is fine for a single hard drive. Most ATA drives cannot saturate the 33MB/s ATA bus anyway. I doubt you would ever notice the difference.

However, the ATA66 bus is only good for drives up to 120GB. Anything bigger and you'll need a PCI ATA133 card or a capable FW external case.

[Luca Rescigno]

I beg to differ. For a while I had a third hard drive connected to the ATA/33 bus, and transfers to and from that drive took significantly longer than transfers between my two ATA/66 drives, even though they were all 7200 RPM drives. Maybe you could put the less-used 30 GB on the ATA/33 bus just to see how fast or slow it goes, before you go ahead and buy a new drive and/or enclosure, but I think you'll agree that the ATA/33 really does slow it down.

[scottiB]

Originally posted by Eriamjh:
However, the ATA66 bus is only good for drives up to 120GB. Anything bigger and you'll need a PCI ATA133 card or a capable FW external case.

Apparently, that's not the case with 2002 QuickSilvers (see here)

Kikaida, since your G4 can handle drives larger than 120GB, I'd find the largest I could afford and use the 30GB on the ATA-33 bus for archiving or backing-up important docs that you only need to access occasionally. I wouldn't use it for iMovie, but it wouldn't be a bad place to keep an iTunes library.

Here's a 250GB drive for $140 (after rebate).

[Eriamjh]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
I beg to differ. For a while I had a third hard drive connected to the ATA/33 bus, and transfers to and from that drive took significantly longer than transfers between my two ATA/66 drives, even though they were all 7200 RPM drives. Maybe you could put the less-used 30 GB on the ATA/33 bus just to see how fast or slow it goes, before you go ahead and buy a new drive and/or enclosure, but I think you'll agree that the ATA/33 really does slow it down.

Actually, if you put two drives on the same ATA66 bus, they should run slower (or as slow) than one drive on the ATA33 bus and the other on the ATA66 bus. Why? Because only one IDE device can "talk" at a time on an IDE bus. Two drives on the same bus will have to share (one reads then the other writes, repeat) the bus resulting in slower transfers. When on two busses, they can read and write simulataneously.

No matter. At least he knows his options.

As for the 2002 QS's working with LBA drives, I wasn't aware of that. Mine is a 2001QS (800DP).

[Link]

That's just odd! I wonder if knowing that, the chipset also supports 1gb DIMMs in the slots instead of 512's...

Could the 2002 QSes possibly hold 3gb?! Oh maan I'd be kicking myself for not waiting 3 months now.

[scottiB]

Are there 1GB DIMMS for the QuickSilvers? All I've seen are 2x512 kits. I always believed that it was the DDR G4s that may be able to handle 1GB modules.

I have a DP/800, too, Eriamjh, and a little peeved about it. Well, that's why I bought a RAID card.

[scottiB]

woops--quoted myself