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schalliol · Oct 7, 2005, 07:05 PM

Strange DB problems:

I'm sure this is somewhere on this forum, but my searches haven't found it:

I would like to add a 5th hard drive inside my G4/733 (as below). I currently have a pair of 60GB IDE drives and a pair of 9.2GB Seagate Ultra160 SCSI drives with a card, so I don't have room down below. I understand that there is not a factory way to add a drive in the 3.5" removeable bay below the SuperDrive, but have others done things to make that work? Also, there is room up top and my machine doesn't seem to get hot with the 4 7200 RPM drives in there as it is. Plus, since this new 120GB IDE drive needs to have an IDE channel, I could use the 3.5" bay's connector to the IDE bus. Of course I have both spots full in my bottom bus. Thoughts? Thanks!

OreoCookie · Oct 7, 2005, 07:22 PM

Take out the SCSI drives. The extra harddrive will more than make up for the `missing' capacity.

schalliol · Oct 7, 2005, 10:34 PM

I'm going to put in the drive for sure, and I have an open IDE channel, it's just a question of where to put it in this question, if that wasn't clear. I'd have to get a new cable or extension cable anyway if I took out the Ultra160 card and drives. Any thoughts on the mounting?

schalliol · Oct 8, 2005, 03:21 AM

Well, I just tried it out and I was able to incorporate one of the drives easily in the 3.5" bay. I really heard people say that it was difficult, but it was a piece of cake. That bus isn't as fast as the other bus, so I put the least important of the drives on that bus and it seems to work great!

OreoCookie · Oct 8, 2005, 03:44 AM

Yes, but you can put four drives in a DA, not five, four. You can use the connector as you proposed and it will work fine, but the ATA33 bus will seriously limit the performance of your drive.

There are no extension cables for ATA, you have to make due with what you have. This means, if you want an ATA drive running at full speed with your other drives, you'd have to install an ATA card and take out one SCSI/ATA drive you already have.

schalliol · Oct 8, 2005, 01:27 PM

I've got the five in and it works well.

The drive I mounted in the 3.5" bay is slower, but it's still not that slow (ran Xbench). Clearly it's better to have one drive running slightly slower than lack a drive.

astepanuks · Oct 8, 2005, 04:53 PM

Originally Posted by schalliol

I've got the five in and it works well.

The drive I mounted in the 3.5" bay is slower, but it's still not that slow (ran Xbench). Clearly it's better to have one drive running slightly slower than lack a drive.

I have also installed a drive in my G4 Sawtooth in the space below DVD burner. Yes, the bus is slower, but performance is still acceptable.

Just a thought, I just ordered a SATA PCI card and will be replacing 2 out of my 3 ATA drives with 2 SATA ones. I will leave one ATA connected to main bus @ 120 Gig and 2 X SATA @ 250 gig.

mduell · Oct 8, 2005, 05:01 PM

I'd think about tossing your SCSI disks.
A 250GB drive (about $110 with a 5 year warranty) would give you nearly twice as much storage as all of your current drives combined, and would probably be faster than even your SCSI disks.
Keep your IDE disks for backups or something.

schalliol · Oct 8, 2005, 06:32 PM

I currently have a 18GB Striped RAID on the Ultra160 SCSI drives, two 60GB IDE drives and one 120GB IDE Drive (this drive was $20 after rebate at office depot) - or 258GB. The workstation class drives in the RAID 0 configuration are quite quick, and of course they're already in there. I'd be willing to sell the card and drives at some point, but I think this does me pretty well for low cash. Certainly SATA drives with a controller would be nice, but of course such a setup requires money.

OreoCookie · Oct 8, 2005, 06:51 PM

Yes, but you won't be able to fit in your new drive into the case. So either you buy a Firewire enclosure or you take out one drive. And at one point you implicitly said your SCSI drives are 7.2k rpm drives. If that's true, every harddrive you can buy nowadays will be faster. Even if they are 10k drives, they will only be faster randomly accessing files.

If you really hesitate to take out your scsi drives, just get a firewire enclosure and be done with it.

schalliol · Oct 8, 2005, 07:14 PM

It's in the case right now. 5 hard drives are in the case with a Pioneer DVR-110D runing smoothly.

OreoCookie · Oct 8, 2005, 07:28 PM

Still, the ATA33 bus will limit your performance. As long as you don't mind, good luck with your setup.

schalliol · Oct 8, 2005, 07:48 PM

Thanks for the thoughts. Yes, as I stated earlier it is limiting, but Xbench shows pretty decent performance that will serve the purpose of the drive well.

Tyre MacAdmin · Oct 11, 2005, 12:19 PM

At one time I have 6 drives total inside my Digital Audio G4. 4 ultra160 Altas drives attached to an Attotech Ultra160 card and then 2 ATA drives to the onboard ATA chip. It ran good but it's a lot of stress on the psu. Make sure the psu in your system is strong and it should run no problem.