How do I install a 3rd Hard drive?

Question

I have a 2000 Quicksilver that already has two hard drives installed. My question is, now that I have purchased a 3rd hard drive, where do I mount it? I see an open space below the CD drive and ZIP drive, but no mounting bracket/sled. Is there a piece of hardware I can buy to mount the drive?

Answer 1

Hi, widowmaker -
A G4 QuickSilver model, like all earlier G4's, has two built-in ATA controllers, one for each built-in bus. One provides connections for up to two internal hard drives; the other is intended to provide connection for the optical drive and the (optional) Zip drive.
The baseplate has three positions for drives -
The front position, #1, and the middle position, #2, are where factory-installed SCSI drives would be placed.
The rear position, position #3, is where the initial two ATA hard drives mount, using the included sled.
Positions 1 and 2 can also be used for individual ATA drives. The problem in adding a third (and even a fourth) ATA drive is the absence of a controller. The solution is to add a PCI card controller; if it is a single-channel card, it can connect up to two additional drives.
If you get such a card as an ATA/100 or ATA/133, 48-bit LBA compliant card, you can then use ATA (or PATA = Parallel ATA) drives larger than 128GB (the built-in controller on all G4's and the early QS models has a drive size limit of 128GB) - although OS 9 has a volume limit of about 200GB, OSX has no problem using large drives.
However, it may be of advantage to add a SATA PCI card instead; this will allow the use of SATA (Serial ATA) drives, which are becoming more common. The G5 and Intel models use SATA drives; doing this would allow future use of the drives in a newer machine.
Some folk have mounted a third drive above the optical drive, or even performed surgery on the Zip drive space to permit fitting a standard-size hard drive there, using the Zip drive's connection on its ATA cable to connect that third drive.
There are at least two problems with doing that - (1) on some models, that ATA bus is slower than the normal bus used by the hard drives; (2) heat dissipation - the internal airflow path is not intended to include removing heat from a hard drive placed up there, and so it may be necessary to increase the cooling capacity of the machine.