Need help choosing hard drive with powermac

i have an old powermac that i never really use but i want to start using it again, but for some reason i only have 38 gb hard drive.. what kind should i buy and i would prefer it be internal

dual 500 mhz powerpc g4
1 gb SDRAM

right now hard drive wise it has

maxtor 54098u8
and
matshitadvd-ram LF-D211A
Iomega Zip 100 Atapi

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Any leading branding IDE drive up to 128GB which is as large as the Gigabit Ethernet will recognise without a PCI controller card. Seagate PATA drive, and not SATA, the modern terminology may well be best as Seagate come with a five year warranty.

You can upgrade the memory to 2GB and the best operating system would be Tiger OS X.4 which can be updated to OS X.4.11. Another good investment is a DL superdrive, such as a Pioneer DVR-115D. They are as cheap as chips, about $39 down under, and if you go to xlr8yourm,ac.com you will find how tos for both the hard and optical drive replacements, with photos.

In parallel with what harry has recommended, you might want to investigate some of the problems people are having with recent Seagate drives. I don't know if it applies to smaller drive sizes.

As you're limited to 128 Gb or less, check what Hitachi has to offer. I've found them very reliable, slightly dearer than Seagate. I've been wary of Western Digital since I had two of their drives die on me.

You might also like to investigate more than one drive, eg. 2 x 80 Gb drives, or two 120 Gb, one for everyday use, one for storage. I think G4's will take up to four drives, but all have to be ATA, or 3 x ATA and one SCSI (complicated).

In addition to xlr8yourmac, YouTube has some very good videos on working inside tower Macs.

Hitachi or Seagate 7,200rpm PATA drive would be my choice.

I've had multiple failures with both Maxtor and WD drives, think QC is non-existant in those places.

Welcome to M-Fs BTW!