Aging Mac Part 2 - Hard Drive
A large hard drive is essential with most of the applications and uses for a computer today. With games getting larger and larger, MP3′s and digital video getting more and more popular, people are often running out of disk space. What could be a better solution than to get a second drive.
Buying and installing a second hard drive, or just replacing a drive is not nearly as hard as one would think. And not as expensive as you may think. This is not a specific how to article, but a brief rundown to give you an idea of what to expect if you want to attempt this. Good how to articles are already available from Apple and others, so creating one here would be a real waste of time.
The first thing you must do is decide if you want to add a second drive, or replace the one you have. If you replace your current drive, you will lose all your data (unless you back it up, and restore from disks). The solution to this problem is a second drive. If you have a PowerMac, you can add a second drive as an internal or an external. If you have an iMac, or a G4 cube, you have to get an external drive if you want to have a second drive since there is no room in these computers for a second drive. Some Blue and White G3′s (rev. 1) can’t handle a second drive unless you install an IDE controller card such as the Sonnet Tempo cards (discussed later). They run about $90 and provide excellent compatibility and speed.
The second question is how much disk space you wish to have. In most cases, you will want to get 40 GB or more disk space. There are drives with as much as 120 GB available for purchase these days, but unless you have a need for such vast storage, you are just throwing money away. If you are adding a second drive, remember that you still have your current drive, and its respective storage space.
The third question is what type. Unless you have a SCSI drive or controller already, or know you know you need SCSI for your application already (such as for RAID), you most likely will do best with an EIDE drive. IDE drives despite many fairy tales, are very fast, and run as fast as SCSI in most cases. A few years ago that was a different story. The biggest difference these days is the price. SCSI is extremely expensive, so if you don’t know what it is, you don’t need it. Trust me. Modern IDE drives are fast enough for most users.
There are several variations of IDE drives such as ATA/33, ATA/66, ATA/100, and ATA/133. All are backwards compatible, meaning you can mix and match IDE controllers and drives. For example, I can use an ATA/100 drive with an ATA/33 controller. Something to note is you always get the performance and features of the lowest. In my example, ATA/33. The rule of thumb these days is to stick with ATA/100. The only reason to go with ATA/133 is for really large drives. If you don’t have that large of a drive, again you are wasting money, since there won’t be a real speed improvement.
The next question is which drive to buy. I personally recommend the Seagate Barracuda series. I bought a 7200RPM 40 GB drive for under $100, which is a great deal. It is an ATA/100 drive. As I said before, it will work with any other ATA controller. Other good brands to look at are Maxtor and Western Digital. Stay away from IBM since their drives in recent months have been plagued with problems (I recently had to replace my IBM drive). You can check out MacVillage.net Store for some drives [Link]
Now if you have a Revision 1 B&W G3, you need a controller card. My personal recommendation is the Sonnet Tempo card [Link]. It’s fast, and very compatible. It works in OS 9 and OS X, you can also boot off of a disk connected to it (very important).
A Revision 2 B&W G3, as well as PowerMac G4′s are capable of having 2 drives on the built in controller . The drives go one on top of the other. While the second drive is known as the “slave”, from the users side, there is no difference. They are both just as fast, and can do anything the other can.
A good place for information on installing your new drive would be XLR8YourMac.com [Link].
For external Hard Drives, that is much easier. In many cases, once you buy the drive it is simply plug in, and use it. There are two major types, defined by their interface: Firewire, and USB. Firewire is a faster interface (only good if your computer supports it) than USB, though a newer version of USB, known as USB 2.0 is equally as fast as Firewire, though you will need to add a USB card (with 2.0 support for speed, otherwise it will be much slower. Check the MacVillage.net Store for a selection of drives [Link].
A downside to external drives is that they are significantly more expensive, and take up desk space.
I hope this article introduced you to the idea of adding a second hard drive. This article wasn’t meant to guide you through the process of putting the drive in, but was to help navigate your thought process as you decide upon the right drive, and to help you make an educated choice about your options.
You can use the following forum thread to share information about new drives (both internal and external):
[Link]
