[qyn]

I want to add another internal hard drive to my dual 800 G4 Quicksilver. I already have 2 internal ATA drives (the one it came with and one I added). It seems like adding a third will be more complicated.

My requirements:
-bootable
-reasonably priced (less than $100)
-fast would be nice, since I want to put the OS on it (so fast swap space, etc)

It appears that due to the internal cabling, I can't just add a third drive to the main ATA bus (no spot on the ribbon cable, no room to put the drive). Is that a correct assessment?

So here's what I think my options are:
-Internal firewire (have to get a card, I think)
-Internal SCSI (have to get a card, I think)
-Remove the ZIP drive and put a drive in its place

I'd prefer not to remove the ZIP drive, since I use it occasionally.

Any thoughts? Have I stated the various options correctly, or is there a better way?

thanks

[SSharon]

Your ideas are all plausible, but my advice would be to invest in a firewire hard drive and not use it as a boot drive. I've never heard of an internal firewire drive and an internal SCSI will be over 100 dollars. So if you don't feel like replacing the zip drive with an external one (and why should you) I say buy a cheap hard drive (look for 50 cents per GB after rebates) and put it in a firewire case (about 30 dollars depending on chipset and manufacturer). Obviously get a 7200 rpm drive and if its a difference of nothing or just a few dollars get one with 8mb cache. This may come out to over 100 dollars depending on what size hard drive you want (and its not internal like you want) but I think its worth it from personal experience.

[D'Espice]

Removing the Zip drive might seem smart at first, however you'll face some performance issues with your new harddrive. The PowerMac's secondary ATA bus is UDMA33 only which while being fast enough for CD, DVD and Zip drives, will be too slow for a harddrive. Nowadays, harddrives have an average throughput of 40-50 MB/s which means that the UDMA33 interface with 33MB/s minus overhead will be an unnecessary bottleneck.

[tr]

Originally posted by qyn:
I want to add another internal hard drive to my dual 800 G4 Quicksilver. I already have 2 internal ATA drives (the one it came with and one I added). It seems like adding a third will be more complicated.

My requirements:
-bootable
-reasonably priced (less than $100)
-fast would be nice, since I want to put the OS on it (so fast swap space, etc)

It appears that due to the internal cabling, I can't just add a third drive to the main ATA bus (no spot on the ribbon cable, no room to put the drive). Is that a correct assessment?

So here's what I think my options are:
-Internal firewire (have to get a card, I think)
-Internal SCSI (have to get a card, I think)
-Remove the ZIP drive and put a drive in its place

I'd prefer not to remove the ZIP drive, since I use it occasionally.

Any thoughts? Have I stated the various options correctly, or is there a better way?

thanks

one option i think you left out is internal ATA (you'd have to get a card for that too, something like this ). i think that would be your best option. it would be fast (faster than the interface on your motherboard), and drive prices are pretty low nowadays, so you could get a good amount of storage. the card would allow you to add 2 drives if you desire. i have a SIIG ATA RAID card in my G4 450, and it works great.

an internal firewire drive is a possibility, but i don't think it's very cost effective. i actually have an internal firewire drive in my G4 that i use for mp3's and such (the sawtooths had an internal firewire port built in on the motherboard, so no PCI card needed). i wouldn't recommend doing it, though; i just kinda did it for kicks, i figured, got the port, why not? in order to do it, you'll have to get a firewire/ATA bridgeboard (i got one of these ). then i mounted my drive on top of the superdrive.

tr