Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

sek929 · Feb 5, 2003, 03:45 PM

I have the first revision Quicksilver 733 and I am wondering if it is all possible to have more than two internal HDDs. The Zip drive bay and subsequent IDE cable is open but I heard that older Powermacs just simply do not support more than two ATA Hard Drives.

Anyone know for sure? I've searched Apple.com day in and day out and have found no concrete evidence.

Particle_Man · Feb 5, 2003, 05:51 PM

By "older macs" they usually mean Beige or Blue & White G3's. The Quicksilvers will support another hard drive on the same chain as the CD drive without a problem. I've run one that way quite often until I got an internal Zip to put in there. I still use that connection to transfer files when friends bring over bare drives.

schalliol · Feb 5, 2003, 05:56 PM

If you want 3 or 4 hard drives, you probably ought to consider a RAID 0 or 1, RAID 0 will increase your performance but doubles the possibility your volume will fail due to hardware problems in the drives & RAID 1 increases the redundancy and could improve performance on reads.

If you want to go this route, consider an ATA RAID card or the forthcoming SoftRAID 3. With the RAID card you'd have a new faster ATA connection that you could use for the bottom bays.

iamnid · Feb 5, 2003, 10:38 PM

You could always get an IDE controller card to put an extra drive in there... there's certainly room for the drive if you have a pci slot. You could also get a firewire bridge and use that internal firewire port.

sek929 · Feb 6, 2003, 01:37 AM

Particle_Man, so I'd just need to buy another IDE cable with three terminals and it would work fine?If so, sweeeet...

schalliol · Feb 6, 2003, 01:51 AM

No, I believe that the chains only support a master and slave unit. As a result, if you do not use the Zip bay for a zip, a hard drive could go in there and be the 2nd device on the chain.

You can use two in the bottom because it's a separate (and slower) bus. You really ought to get an ATA/133 controller and drive if you wish to have better performance.

Cipher13 · Feb 6, 2003, 01:54 AM

Originally posted by sek929:
Particle_Man, so I'd just need to buy another IDE cable with three terminals and it would work fine?If so, sweeeet...

You can have two devices per bus; a master and a slave. It doesn't matter what they are.

HD, Zip, CD, DVD - mix and match.

I have two HD's on one bus, and a HD and DVD on the other bus in my Sawtooth.

schalliol · Feb 6, 2003, 02:02 AM

Yeah, but also remember that the secondary (CD) bus is an ATA/66 bus (if I recall correctly). You can get an ATA/133 drive and bus, that should be faster than using 66. However, if you buy a faster drive you could later migrate it if you have more money at a later date.

solitere · Feb 6, 2003, 02:54 AM

Originally posted by Cipher13:
You can have two devices per bus; a master and a slave. It doesn't matter what they are.

HD, Zip, CD, DVD - mix and match.

I have two HD's on one bus, and a HD and DVD on the other bus in my Sawtooth.

It�s generally not recommended to have on the same cable to run a CD-R/DVD and a HD. It affects the HD-performance.

schalliol · Feb 6, 2003, 03:01 AM

Yeah, they also try to make it tough to put anything else in that bay because of that (at least in Digital Audio models. They had no prob with me having 5 internal hard drives in my 9600, but they specifically indicate the drives they mention you can use in these machines. You could technicallly have 6 hard drives plus a CD/DVD drive (if the power supply could handle it) by utilizing all 4 bottom bays plus the zip bay and area above the CD/DVD.

sek929 · Feb 6, 2003, 01:26 PM

Hrm ok, so I can use it in the empty zip bay but it will be slow eh?

Is there any way to set the HD as master and have the CD-RW set to slave? I rarely use the CD-RW (well less than a HDD would be used at least).

This damn campus network coupled with Direct Connect is really eating up disk space and I really don't want to copy everything off of my 45 gig to another drive, plus buying another 45 or 60 is cheaper than gettting the 80 or 100 that would replace the 45.

Descisions, descisions...

Biggerfoot · Feb 7, 2003, 03:49 AM

I have three hard drives in my 733mhz G4 QuickSilver. No additional cards used. I do not have the Zip drive.

What I did was slave the 3rd drive off of the CDRW. I did need an internal power cord to do it and used a hard drive bracket with Velcro to place it on the metal case were the zip would have gone.

I have used this set up for over a year and it normally runs 24/7 without a problem or heating issue.