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Rychiar · Dec 1, 2003, 12:47 PM

my G4 has space for 4 hardrives and 4 power cables for them but theres no place to put another IDE cable so how can ya put 4 drives in?

PAC-Rat · Dec 1, 2003, 01:44 PM

buy a ATA PCI card. I have a SIIG Ultra ATA/133 and it works flawlessly in Panther. It allows up to 4 more hard drives or compatible ATA devices (some CDROM drives work, I think). Or you can get a RAID card, but I don't know much about that (there are many threads that have covered which RAID card to get).
There are also serial ATA PCI cards (FirmTek SeriTek/1S2) for using serial ata hard drives.

SSharon · Dec 7, 2003, 06:05 PM

is this the case with all of the G4's? I know my MDD (dual 1.0) has four slots but I thought there was at least a slot on the motherboard (didn't see a cable) for the second IDE channel. I used 2 slots so far but I want another HD and I guess I need to decide between an PCI-ATA-133 card or if I can just plugging in a cheap cable onto the MB.

PAC-Rat · Dec 7, 2003, 06:57 PM

i've heard you can just plug into the ata66 slot on the motherboard (MDD). I can't try it though, as I don't have an MDD.

SSharon · Dec 7, 2003, 07:14 PM

yea, thats what I thought but I don't think a cable is in there so it may be worth it to buy the card b/c ata-66 only supports HD's up to 120gb or something and I want more. With the card I also don't have to move my old HD's (80 and 120gb) just change the jumper setting b/c I have them messed up and it slows down my startup time.

l008com · Dec 15, 2003, 06:32 PM

The MDD's have 4 hard drive bays and two IDE channels (two drives per channel). You don't need to buy a card for them. Unless you are using a software raid, in which case you'd want only one drive per channel. I have a two drive raid in my MDD so I have one drive on each channel and it runs like a champ.

SSharon · Dec 15, 2003, 07:22 PM

thanks for the info, yea, I'm not interested in any kind of raid setup just lots of storage. its just that if there is no cable in there on the second channel and I need to buy one its not much more money to buy an ATA-133 card that comes with a cable and use that instead of the slower ATA-(33 or 66) that it comes with which also doesn't support large drive sizes.

malarkyout · Jan 2, 2004, 11:45 PM

Originally posted by SSharon:
thanks for the info, yea, I'm not interested in any kind of raid setup just lots of storage. its just that if there is no cable in there on the second channel and I need to buy one its not much more money to buy an ATA-133 card that comes with a cable and use that instead of the slower ATA-(33 or 66) that it comes with which also doesn't support large drive sizes.

I have three HDs in my G4, one in the old zip bay, but I was able to jam a couple more SCSI HDs in the bottom just laying on each other, all I needed was my 20MB/sec PCI card which set me back like 15 bucks. The only problem I had was that you can't put your computer to sleep with SCSI in it, so you should probably follow other people's advice and get the IDE HDs and their controllers. I have 230GBs internal in my comp, but I just use firewire externals HDs now.