[packet of krisps]

Hey guys, I appreciate all the help I have received from you so far.

The MDD is the one in my signature, it is NOT FW 800. I am going to use some of the parts from my old PC. I have a SATA 2 controller card, and I am going to put a 150GB raptor and a 500GB WD on it. I have many IDE maxtors I have pulled from the G4s over the years, the SATA card supports 2 IDE drives as well, and I still have a 2 I can run off the logic board, the only thing that is stopping me is the PSU, I am not sure what the wattage is on it and would like to know how many HD's it can handle. The G4 has a 128MB Ge-Force and a newer set of asus DVD-ROM and DVD- RW drives and 1.5GB of DDR. I have searched all over apple's forums and I have found no direct answer to this.

Thanks for the help again!

[mduell]

Keep adding more until weird things happen.

[angelmb]

Well, my MDD is like yours but single, 1,25GHz not FW800, it has had four internal IDE hard disk without any issue… but noise, they added too much noise to make it worth.

Power supply model… mine is the AcBel,
Power Supply 661-2816 PowerMac G4 Mirrored Door 360W Power Supply Apple Mac Parts and Repairs from VIS Ltd

[OreoCookie]

Why would you want to put a Raptor in such an ancient machine?

[angelmb]

but… a MDD is still supported by Apple

I wonder, is SATA that faster than fastest ATA?. I know it doesn't take more than to attach a given SATA PCI card to a PCI slot, just wondering if they are that faster…

And what about noise?, are they noisier? quieter?, pretty much the same?.

[OreoCookie]

Serial ATA is technically faster, but practically it is not faster than the fastest version of parallel ATA (the drives are slower than both connection standards). Of course, most newer drivers are offered as SATA drives, so they're faster because they are newer, but not because SATA makes much of a difference as far as speed is concerned. Any noise you hear comes from the drive and not the interface

SATA has a few advantages (smaller cables, official support for hot-plugging, compatibility to SAS (you can use SATA drives with your favorite SAS controller), etc.), though.

[angelmb]

Thanks for your wisdom. I had read somewhere about them being 50% faster, something like 150Mbps vs. 100Mbps… to my particular needs that's not enough to ditch my current hard drive and put there a newer since with this speed and 160 GB I have enough. I understand mechanical components are the ones to blame when it comes to noise, I just guessed maybe they had improved them, new materials, the bearing system, whatever… I guess it is pretty much like with the power supply fans, speed them down and suddenly they become silent.

One last question… is the plug that powers the hard disk so 'hard' to attach / de-attach as with the parallel ATA hard disks?, it is the most annoying thing inside of my Mac.

[OreoCookie]

The fastest parallel ATA standard has a raw throughput of 133 MB/s, SATA either 150 or 300. However, even the fastest harddrives cannot transmit more than roughly 110 MB/s if that data happens to be in the cache of the harddrive. If it is not, then harddrive throughput maxes out about 70-90 MB/s (excluding SCSI/SAS drives, of course). As you can see, parallel ATA is fast enough. There is one minor qualification: two drives might share a common bus. That's why many later systems using PATA interconnects (e. g. earlier models of the XRaid) had one dedicated PATA bus for each harddrive.

Regarding noise, if you're worried about noise, get a Samsung drive, they are in my experience the quietest drives around.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

Why would you want to put a Raptor in such an ancient machine

If your usage is disk bound, why not?

[packet of krisps]

My usage is nothing special, I just have a raptor laying around, all of this stuff was pulled from my custom PC before I sold it.

Thanks for the advice, all!

And hey! It's not ancient, not even vintage by MacTracker's standards!

[Lateralus]

The S in Seagate stands for Silence. Or at least it should...

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

Regarding noise, if you're worried about noise, get a Samsung drive, they are in my experience the quietest drives around.

Thanks, your experience is welcome.

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by packet of krisps 

And hey! It's not ancient, not even vintage by MacTracker's standards!

haha I was going to put a screenshot showing exactly that, but worth considering later, anybody could come and put some benchmarks and we MDD users would see how our beloved Macs pale in comparison

[Andrew Stephens]

I've got four drives in my MDD G4. For a while and because I needed to I had a fifth hooked into the empty optical bay too! I didn't find the noise a problem and the PSU seemed to cope. Mind you the mac is over the other side of the studio.

It's worth noting with these Macs that they will only boot to FW target mode etc is the boot drive is in the same place on the bus as the shipping configuration, so you can end up trying to target mode and it looking like a failed motherboard or similar.

[gto47]

You could connect it to an xraid if you put a fiber channel card in it. We had one where i worked with this setup. Was a good server.

[chichow]

I had a MDD G4 1.25 DP also.
This is what I had:
Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.25 DP (MDD) Specs (Mirrored Drive Doors - M8573LL/A) @ EveryMac.com

I also had 4 drives in my machine without problems. The only thing is that a lot of the time, the fans would really be loud and on alot with all 4 drives. Later on, I just had one SATA drive and one PATA drive in the machine to keep it cooler and thus reduce the fan noise. Everything else I just ran external.

So

My machine handled 4 drives w/o issue all the time. There would be more fan noise with 4 drives than 2 drives.

and

I also used SATA, but only because SATA drives were getting cheaper than PATA drives at 500GB sizes and above.

[angelmb]

Interesting, with my MDD (1.25 single) were the additional hard drives who added noise more noticeably than the huge 12cm fan which I later replaced BTW.