[ort888]

So anyway, I bought a Quicksilver 733 from my work for $150 bucks. Decided to throw in a new DVD burner, USB 2 card and a big 300 gig hard drive... only it seems that I have forgotten that older G4s could only support 128 gigs. I swear I knew that at one point, but I guess I had forgotten in my excitement, since I have already purchased everything.

At any rate, having all of that storage is important to me and the main reason I bought this thing. What are my options here? If I put this drive in an external enclosure will I have the same problem? It looks like a newer ATA controller PCI card will also do the trick, but they seem expensive. What is the cheapest I can pick one up?

Any advice in this area? I obviously know little. I don't want to spend a lot of cash, since my wife already thinks this whole project is a waste of money (and it probably is).

[mduell]

Three options:

Buy the driver that lets you use drives larger than 128GB. The "catch" is you need a partition in the first 128GB for the OS to be on and another partition for the space over 128GB. $45 IIRC.

Buy an external Firewire enclosure and boot off that. You can have the entire disk as one big partition, but there is a small speed penalty. $30-50 depending on aesthetics and chipset.

Buy a disk controller. Most of them won't work in your Mac or cause problems with sleeping, but there are a few Mac specific models that work great. $80-100 IIRC.

[ort888]

Thanks for the quick advice!

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/ACARD/AEC6280M/

What about this one? Do you know if it has any issues?

[Eug Wanker]

Aren't there issues with that software hack to allow drives greater than 128 GB in an older Mac?

[mduell]

Originally Posted by ort888

Thanks for the quick advice!

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/ACARD/AEC6280M/

What about this one? Do you know if it has any issues?

Looks like it should work to me. Look it up on xlr8yourmac to see has sleeping issues.

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Aren't there issues with that software hack to allow drives greater than 128 GB in an older Mac?

The OS needs to be in the first 128GB (so you should create a partition under 128GB first and install the OS in that); also IIRC you have to use another machine to create partitions past the first 128GB of the disk. That's all I've heard of.

[Eug Wanker]

OK I found this PDF about the software hack:

1) If you already setup your extended capacity drive as a 128 Gig, you'll need to backup your data and set it up again to get the full capacity.
2) If you boot from another source which does not have the Intech kext installed (such as an original OS X installation CD), the sectors which are located beyond the 128 Gigabyte boundary will not be accessible. This will result in i/o errors (see "Safe Partitioning" below to avoid such problems).
3) While you can safely boot from a drive which is greater than 128 Gigabytes in size, you CAN NOT SAFELY boot from a volume if ANY of its sectors are located beyond the 128 Gigabyte boundary. So if you plan to boot from this drive, you need to follow one of the following procedures listed in "Safe Partitioning".
4) Blue and White G3's. Among the problems present in the Ultra-33 ATA controller on the Blue and White G3 computer is the inability to do 48-bit addressing with any type of DMA writes. If you have this machine, you will need to connect your extended capacity ATA drive to the Multi-Word DMA bus (which is the same bus your CD/DVD ROM is connected to). Do not connect an extended capacity drive to the Ultra DMA bus. It will cause your computer to hang.
5) If your extended capacity ATA drive is your only bootable hard disk drive, please send us an e-mail requesting a special driver and partitioner we developed exclusively for this purpose. Make sure you the subject of the e-mail says the following exactly: "Intech ATA Hi-Cap Extender Request."

Doesn't sound like a great solution.

The new ATA controller idea is a good one though. Too bad it's not an option in my Cube. I just use a Firewire drive. My ATA enclosure handles up to 400 GB. I wanted to get a SATA enclosure since there are bigger SATA drives available, but nobody sells SATA --> Firewire enclosures locally.

[spork]

Isn't the best solution a PCI controller card for ide drive and the best low buck solution an external firewire case? You can boot from firewire.
I asked in the Powermac Storage FAQ and received this reply. Would the stated help in the reply be this driver?
thanks


Originally Posted by spork
Hello all,
can i partition an IDE drive larger than 128, such as 160gb, temporarily in an external firewire case, into 2 @ 80gb for example and then install it inside my early G4 tower and expect to see 2 new drives on my desktop?

Yes, you can do this and two new drives will mount. Each will claim to be 74.5 GB in size. However, only the first partition would be safe to access.

Since your motherboard IDE controller cannot read/write past 128GB without help, it will do fine on the first partition. But it will screw up whenever it tries to get past 53.4 GB into the 2nd partition - that is 128 GB into the physical drive.

[ort888]

It sounds like I don't want to mess with the software solution. I don't want to have to deal with workarounds and hacks.

I also don't want to go with an external drive, since it means that I will have to go out and buy a new internal drive and a new enclosure. (The hard drive that came with this computer makes a horrible high-pitched squealing sound that can be heard in other rooms)

The PCI card looks like my best bet... but I just want to make sure that I won't have any problems using it to control my boot drive. Will it be a problem if it controls the only drive in the machine???

Part of me just wants to screw it and format the drive for 128 megs and just put it into an external down the road at some point.

[spork]

I don't want to go with an external drive, since it means that I will have to go out and buy a new internal drive

why not boot from the 300gb drive with OSX on it in a firewire enclosure, purchased for less than 50 bucks? Dump the original 30/40gb hard drive if it is screaming.

[Matt S]

Hi, new member here:

My Sawtooth (450 -> GigaDesigns 1.8) has a 120GB Seagate ($60 long ago) internal, and a 200GB Maxtor ($29 black-friday Staples) in a MacAlly 140F (check Amazon, $40) enclosure. Very nice setup. The Firewire drive is as fast (seems faster, sometimes), as the internal. The other way to go is to get an internal SATA drive but I don't think you're hurting that much.

Another nice thing about externals (firewire is my experience) is they sleep separately from each other. Am still wondering about the effects of the drives' spinning up and down all the time but what the heck, I'll learn something for less than it cost me to go to college!

If you're looking for a good enclosure, be sure to check out FatWallet's enclosure thread at www.fatwallet.com. Recently, there was discussion on a DES real-time encrypting enclosure (dual) for a good price, not sure if the price remains as it was. Personally, I prefer Firewire over dual for compatibility issues re: bootable.

-- Matt

[mountainash]

If it is built for Mac, it will be bootable. The only problems I have encountered with these cards is in very old machines (beige boxes), and when the card is installed without a drive attached. I can't see either of these things being a problem for you.

If you want to use the PCI card, you can use the PCI card and the onboard controller at the same time. And with the PCI card, you can run 4 drives (6 if you hack the case a bit). Imagine, four 400Gb drives

I am not 100% certain, but I remember reading about some SII based ata cards which work in the mac under OSX. They are not bootable, though. If they work, they are the cheapest option (less than 20USD for the card). I am planning on getting some cards to test out at some point. You will need to have another drive on the built in ATA to boot from, though.

The firewire case is a nice solution, too. Just make sure that it supports large drives, otherwise you will have the same problems. You could get a cheap USB2 case. Probably is cheaper than a firewire case but it is slower, though.

[Luca Rescigno]

You should really read this. It's the sticky thread at the top of this forum. You know, the one that stays at the top and never goes out of view. And it says "Sticky:" in front of it and it has a little blue thumbtack.