[Horsepoo!!!]

Ok...so my hard drive croaked. The signs were very subtle at first and then when they became obvious it was too late. But anyways, that's another story.

In my fury, I went and bought a DiamondMax Plus 9 HD with 200GB of storage without even thinking "is this a decent HD", "will it work well in my Mac?"...I also remembered that older Mac IDE interfaces didn't recognize drives over a certain amount of GBs and while I haven't actually checked on the net, I'm pretty sure my original Quicksilver Dual 800 G4 is one of the 'old Macs'.

That last one isn't a huge problem...I can live with 128GB for the time being until I buy myself a new machine. Anyways, the big questions are, how are Maxtor drives, how are DiamondMax Plus 9s in particular (if anyone has one), and what are your HD recomendations for a Mac (if I had the chance to return the HD and make a different purchase)?

Oh...I also heard that if sizes over 128GB were detected that intechusa.com had some sort of driver that would allow this...does anyone know how this works?

I'm also read that HDs that are larger that 128GB may not boot on the older Macs. Is this true? Can't the computer just treat the drive as a 128GB drive?

[Horsepoo!!!]

Oh...and is it possible to plug an ATA/133 HD into ATA/66?

[tooki]

1. I've run many Maxtor drives, never had a problem, and in years of Mac tech work, I have come to consider Maxtor as being reliable. These days, I buy Seagate, for a single reason: Seagate gives a 5 year warranty while everyone else gives 1 or 3 years.

2. I have never tried those drivers, but they give me the heebie-jeebies. I think there'd be a risk of data loss, should you have to reinstall the OS (thus requiring the drivers to be reinstalled, too).

3. The only bootability limitation is the following: on some Mac models (beige G3, Wallstreet PowerBook G3, tray-loading iMac G3), Mac OS X will boot only from a partition that is entirely contained within the first 8GB of the drive. (If the partition straddles the 8GB barrier even a tiny bit, it won't work, so usually one formats the boot partition to 7.8GB or so.) Mac OS 9 doesn't care, and you can use the remaining 120GB (max) for another partition to store data.

4. Yes, any IDE drive will work on any IDE bus -- it'll just run at the speed of the slower device. (E.g. ATA/133 drive on an ATA/66 Mac will run at ATA/66 speeds; an ATA/33 drive on an ATA/66 Mac will run at ATA/33 speeds.)

tooki

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by tooki

1. I've run many Maxtor drives, never had a problem, and in years of Mac tech work, I have come to consider Maxtor as being reliable. These days, I buy Seagate, for a single reason: Seagate gives a 5 year warranty while everyone else gives 1 or 3 years.

2. I have never tried those drivers, but they give me the heebie-jeebies. I think there'd be a risk of data loss, should you have to reinstall the OS (thus requiring the drivers to be reinstalled, too).

3. The only bootability limitation is the following: on some Mac models (beige G3, Wallstreet PowerBook G3, tray-loading iMac G3), Mac OS X will boot only from a partition that is entirely contained within the first 8GB of the drive. (If the partition straddles the 8GB barrier even a tiny bit, it won't work, so usually one formats the boot partition to 7.8GB or so.) Mac OS 9 doesn't care, and you can use the remaining 120GB (max) for another partition to store data.

4. Yes, any IDE drive will work on any IDE bus -- it'll just run at the speed of the slower device. (E.g. ATA/133 drive on an ATA/66 Mac will run at ATA/66 speeds; an ATA/33 drive on an ATA/66 Mac will run at ATA/33 speeds.)

tooki

Sounds good to me....I'll just use it for the time being until I get a new Mac that does support >128GB drives. The next time I buy a Mac, 300GB drives will probably be standard and I'll have half a terabyte of storage. *drool*