[bmuki]

We have the mirrored door type Power Mac G4 (dual 1.25 GHz) with a default 80 Gb drive and an additional 240 Gb drive (both are ATA/IDE 100). We also have an external FireWire hard disk with an internal 80 Gb ATA/IDE 100 drive.

I would like to combine the two 80 Gb drives as striped RAID level 0. However, RAIDing an internal and external drive seems like a bad idea (ie, what if I accidentally turn off the power on the external drive?). So I would like to move the external 80 Gb drive inside the G4.

The problem is, the mirror doored G4 only has 2 ATA/IDE 100 slots and 2 ATA/IDE 66 slots. Furthermore, our external hard drive Firewire controller has a 128 Gb limit; so we cannot place the 240 Gb drive in it.

All would be solved if somebody could tell us if we can stick the external 80 Gb drive in an ATA/IDE 66 slot internally. Then all drives would be internal, and we would RAID the two 80s.

[Waragainstsleep]

You can install the 80GB internally and RAID the two 80s. IDE is reverse compatible. If you want the RAID array to be as fast as possible, then put the 80s on the ATA100. Unless either of the 80s are ATA66 drives, in which case the ATA100 speed increase will not apply, so leave the 240 on the ATA100

[bmuki]

Thanks for the information. I will attempt to move the external 80 Gb drive inside on the ATA 66 bus. Then I will RAID 0 the two 80s.

I understand the loss of speed, but my focus is to reduce the number of drives. Three drives just seems like too many. I'll run XBench on the 240 Gb (on the ATA 100) vs. the RAID drives. I'll then but OS X on the faster of the two.

If XBench says the hybrid RAID is too slow, I'll just revert them to normal volumes.

Thanks.

[Waragainstsleep]

I was told never to use a striped array as a boot volume. I forget why. But stick X on the 240. It should be the faster anyway. You do know you'll lose some space when you stripe drives? The final volume will be less than 160GB. Might not get much change from 140.