Can the G4 accommodate external drives in addition to the 2 ATA internals?

Question

Hi all,
I have a G4 dual 1GHz machine (Sales Order Number: M8667LL/A) with two 120 ATA internal drives. I am happy with them but I want to have more HD space. I read Apple's pdf file on G4's capacity and seems to indicate that this tower only will accommodate either two ATA drives or 3 SCSI drives internally. Since I already have the 120 ATA internal, I think I need to hook up external drives. Is this technically feasible? Will my machine accommodate external drives in addition to the internals? And if so, what if any are there limitations on the size? Also, I read a thread debate between USB 2.0 and firewire. It seems that the poster recommends firewire for being technically faster. Would you recommend also?

Answer 1

Hi, Speed Racer -
Your G4 QuickSilver '02 model is designed to have up to four internal ATA hard drives - two in the rear position on the two-drive bracket (sled), and one each in the other two positions. However, in order to use more than two internal hard drives you will need to add a PCI controller card in order to have a bus connection for the additional drives.
Using an ATA/100 or ATA/133 card, one which is 48-bit LBA compliant, will also allow you to use drives larger than 128GB on that card.
You can also use an SATA (Serial ATA) card instead, and SATA drives. The advantage of this is that newer Macs use SATA drives, so the drives would be more likely to be usable on a new machine if and when you get one. SATA also does not have the 128GB limit.
As far as external drives go -
The 128GB limit does not apply to firewire or USB.
Although your machine is both firewire bootable and USB bootable, your machine has USB 1.1, which is far too slow for most things, especially for booting. You should consider firewire only.
You can daisy-chain several firewire devices together - up to 16 devices per firewire port.
Although the specs for firewire on Macs state that the first two devices in a chain can draw power from the firewire bus, it is better to equip all firewire devices with external power - this may be standard with a device, or an optional extra. Doing this relieves the power supply in the Mac from the burden of providing power to the devices.
Note - one of the advantages for having firewire drives is that they are hot-connectable (can be added or removed without shutting down the Mac), hence are very portable. However, disconnecting a firewire drive while it is still mounted on the desktop can damage the drive. Before disconnecting a firewire drive, either shut the Mac down, or dismount the drive - to dismount a firewire drive, either drag its icon to the Trash, or select its icon and press Command-Y (Put Away in File menu); once it has been dismounted (its icon has disappeared from the desktop), it can be disconnected without damage.