New to the forums, not new to Mac. Need help on failing hard drive.

Question

Hello, glad to have found this forum...I need all the help I can get. Let me explain what I have, what it's doing, what I want it to do, what I "think" I need to do.
*What I have:*
733 G4 with superdrive, 512 MB SDRAM, 40 & 60 gig internal original hard drives
*What it is doing:*
For about a year one of the drives (seems to be my 60g start-up drive) has made clicking/popping noises not unlike when you click/cluck your tongue. I've ignored it, foolishly, and gone about my business. Then I began having to click the mouse and punch keys when I start-up in order to get the drive to begin spinning, otherwise it would never kick in and I'd get the "?" face. Anyway, I have been living like that for many months until recently when my start-up drive only had about 500MB left of space, I burned some DVD's and freed up about 6 gig on the drive for some cushion the other day. Well, since doing that, when I start up now I get a spinning globe. I have to hold the option key down at boot and then select the drive manually and I'm back to being fine again.
*What I want it to do:*
I'm freaked out about losing data because I am a photographer and graphic designer, so I would die if I lost any files. I have been using one of my old iPods as a back up drive to dump data on and burning some DVD's too...but still, I have most of my life still on the drive. Here is what I am considering. I would like to get an external drive to move and continue to grow my massive files for my work and creativity. I'm thinking the G-Tech 320 Quad external would be a good fit. Now, moving back inside, my 60g start-up is telling me it's failing and to back up and replace before...well, you know. My 2nd internal drive is 40g and is strictly my iTunes library of MP3s.
How do I save myself and replace my start-up drive?
Do I buy the G-Tech first, move all my files over, then replace the internal, failing 60g? Can I start-up from the G-Tech? Should I/Can I make my 40g the temporary start-up, replace the failing 60g, and go from there? How should I do this and must I get the G-Tech now?
While on this same question, I am getting conflicting information regarding how much my 733 G4 will recognize as far as each drive size. What is the max size each drive can be? What is the max combined?
*What I think I should do:*
I think I should buy the G-Tech, move my life over there, then use the working 40g as my start-up, replace the failing 60g with the largest possible when possible, make the replacement internal the start-up again, use or replace the working/existing 40g as storage/back-up, live happily ever after.
*And on a side note:*
I plan to drop two sticks of 512MB memory, this filling it up to it's max 1.5 gig of memory. Will this have a noticeable affect on my computer? If so, how?
Oh, and the reason I was opting for the Quad G-Tech is because can't I upgrade and add FW800 ports to my G4 rather easily?
Thank you for any time or effort you give me in helping me through this urgent matter. I had run out of places to go and people to ask before running across this forum.

Answer 1

First of all I cannot believe you have no backup strategy and only start to worry about it after problems arise. You're an accident waiting to happen. Before you consider anything make backups.
Basic Backup
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
You can begin addressing the problems with your hard drive(s) after you get your stuff properly backed up. Once that's done get two larger drives for the computer and replace the small ones you now have. Your model should support hard drives up to 128 GBs in size. There is not specific limit on external drives so your external backup drive can be large enough to be partitioned into multiple volumes large enough to backup at least one of the internal drives (using the second internal drive as a backup for the first internal drive. This provides redundancy - an internal and an external backup.) You can then use the additional space on the external drive for your data files.
BTW, you risk catastrophic data loss by allowing the free space on your startup volume to drop below 3 GBs.