[slick70+]

Is it possible to run 2 external hard drives for my G4 mini?

e.g. 1 firewire and one USB?

Also, is it possible to run 2 firewire drives? Do they daisy chain? What is the performance like

I'm looking for external storage and might get 2 x fanless 250GB drives instead of one very noisy 500GB one.

Many thanks!

[peeb]

Yes.
Yes.
Yes,
Good.

[slick70+]

Jeez that was fast. In the time it took me restart my mini due to safari 3 installation, there was the answer.

Nice one.

Putting OSX on one of the drives, does it matter which one? First in chain, the one nearest the mini, I presume?

[studentmacgeek]

A mac can boot of just about any drive that has a system folder on it, there are even reports of someone booting panther off a USB stick.
However, I'd probably use the first in the chain, just because of the order that an EFI mac will look for boot devices; first it looks on all partitions of the internal HD, then optical drive, then first firewire, then second firewire etc.

[dn15]

If you're going to boot a system on an external hard disk I'd recommend doing it with the FireWire drive.

[ginoledesma]

You can get several of the Newertech MiniStacks and keep on stacking if you're keen on keeping the look. One thing I prefer with larger capacity drives instead of smaller ones is that there are less power bricks and cables to deal with.