Three ATA drives in a G4?

Question

Hi
I have a G4 (AGP Graphics) with 2 ATA HD's installed. I want to upgrade to Tiger but on a new drive as I have very little space left on my Macintosh HD.
Can I fit another ATA drive? The manual is slightly vague as to the exact number of ATA/SCSI drives that can be installed so I wanted to make sure before I took the plunge. The teason for using ATA is that I have no free PCI slots to run a SCSI card.
Supposing I can do it what would be the procedure/connections? Would the new Tiger drive be the Master and the other 2 slaves? If so would I need to change ant jumper settings and once installed how would I boot up in order to format the new drive (from the Panther CD?)
Thanks in advance
Chris

Answer 1

Hi, Chris!
Actually, you can add a drive the the optical drive's EIDE bus (jumpered for slave) and it will run there. However, it is far from an optimal solution. That EIDE bus is only ATA-3, which has a max transfer rate of 16.6 MB/sec, versus your current ATA 5 drive bus, which runs at "ATA-66" speeds (max rate of 66.7 MB/sec). If you use the drive on the optical bus for disk intensive operations, it will be painfully slow. Moreover, if you use it to feed the optical drive for concurrent burning to CD/DVD (especially with video), you're likely to encounter some burn problems/failures. If you're just going to use it for storage/archiving files, it will likely be just fine there.
IMO, Jeff's solution is the way to go. With an ATA-133 PCI card, you'll be enhancing your Mac with a fast ATA 7 drive bus, enabling the addition of two more hard drives without regard to any size recognition limit, and will have a second, independent bus availlable for regular use should the native one fail somewhere down the line. Theoretically, based on today's commonly available drives, you'll increase the internal storage capacity by 1TB (based on 2-500GB drive additions)... If you go with a SATA card and one or two new SATA drives, the same applies, but with even better throughput than with an ATA-133 PCI card.
Regarding drive jumper settings, there are none to be concerned with on a SATA drive setup. For ATA, remember that you will have two independent busses/controllers, so you'd set up two Master/Slave configurations, one for the native bus and the other for the PCI card. For example, you now have a master and a slave on the native bus. If you add an ATA-133 PCI card that has a single controller on it (some have two) and add one ATA drive to it, you would set that drive to Master (or "Single, if it's a Western Digital). If you later add a second drive to the card, then you would set one as Master and the other as Slave.
The only other things I would note regarding installation are first, there should always be a drive attached to the end connector of any ATA ribbon cable, which eliminates the possibility of fringe signal interference on the cable (which can corrupt drive data), and second, the Master/Slave relationship applies to enabling the drive bus controller to properly recognize and communicate with the drives and has no bearing on which drive is the boot drive and which isn't - you can boot and run from a Slave drive just as efficiently as you can from a Master. Lastly, whenever adding a new piece of internal hardware (PCI card, drive, video card, etc), it's perhaps a good general practice to do a PRAM reset before booting the first time after the physical install.
Regarding initializing a new drive (fancy term for formatting it for the first time), you'd physically install the drive, boot normally to your startup drive, launch Disk Utility right from there, and initialize/format the new one using DU's Erase option (or the Partition option, if you desire to partition the drive into multiple volumes).
Gary
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