B&W G3 LARGER HARD DRIVE

Racing666 · Jul 20, 2005

my b&w g3 450 has a 9.1gb IBM SCSI hard drive in it right now..i have a DVD Writer and want to write dvd's but i dont think the HDD is large enough, as i only have about 4gb free..i know with Rev. 1 b&w's, there was a data corruption issue, but i have the Rev. 2 board and wish to put a larger hard drive on the IDE bus and get rid of the SCSI setup altogether. My few questions are:
1) what is the hard drive limit in terms of size i can use?

2) i read something about the OS has to be in the first 8 gb of the drive, but can I just use 1 partition if say i get a 40-80-120 gb drive? Or what would be the best way to do it?

3) will i lose performance? i know scsi is supposedly faster than ATA, but if using a PCI adapter card, a scsi hard drive is limited by the 66mhz pci bus..

i just need some guidance i think... and some recommendations.. :dummy:

Dennis

jhelm007 · Jul 20, 2005

Racing666 said:
my b&w g3 450 has a 9.1gb IBM SCSI hard drive in it right now..i have a DVD Writer and want to write dvd's but i dont think the HDD is large enough, as i only have about 4gb free..i know with Rev. 1 b&w's, there was a data corruption issue, but i have the Rev. 2 board and wish to put a larger hard drive on the IDE bus and get rid of the SCSI setup altogether. My few questions are:
1) what is the hard drive limit in terms of size i can use?

2) i read something about the OS has to be in the first 8 gb of the drive, but can I just use 1 partition if say i get a 40-80-120 gb drive? Or what would be the best way to do it?

3) will i lose performance? i know scsi is supposedly faster than ATA, but if using a PCI adapter card, a scsi hard drive is limited by the 66mhz pci bus..

i just need some guidance i think... and some recommendations.. :dummy:

Dennis

I don't the B&Ws have the first 8gig issue. (if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me). I do think there is a size limit for the built in ATA bus around 128 gigabytes. If you replace the SCSI card with an ATA133 host adapter or a SATA host adapter this will not be a problem either.

The B&Ws have either ATA33 or ATA66 built in that's the only reason SCSI is faster. If you use ATA133 adapter and drives or SATA (transfers~150mb/s) they will be faster. ATA100 and ATA133 drives are pretty cheap right now too, so if you got one that was not over the size limit you could hook it up the built in bus and get the host adapter later to speed things up.

Good luck

Racing666 · Jul 20, 2005

even if using an ata controller card, wouldnt it have to slow down to the PCI's 66mhz bus anyway? kinda defeats the purpose...if i could find a cheap SCSI hard drive around 40-80 gb, i'd be all set..its got the scsi that has a trapezoid shaped type connector, not the regular scsi that looks like ata..not sure if its called SCSI2 or Ultra Scsi or what...

Dennis

jhelm007 · Jul 20, 2005

Racing666 said:
even if using an ata controller card, wouldnt it have to slow down to the PCI's 66mhz bus anyway? kinda defeats the purpose...if i could find a cheap SCSI hard drive around 40-80 gb, i'd be all set..its got the scsi that has a trapezoid shaped type connector, not the regular scsi that looks like ata..not sure if its called SCSI2 or Ultra Scsi or what...

Dennis

33 or 66 MHz is way faster than any hard drive on the end user market dtoday can transfer data.

The 66 or 33 in ATA33 or ATA66 is the transfer speed in MB/s not a MHz speed.

The PCI bus is plenty fast to handle the throughput of up to 4 hard drives even at RAID speeds.

I have a PCI ATA Host on my B&W because it has a Rev 1 MoBo, but I think even if I had a Rev. 2, I would keep the Host adapter because of the performance advantage.

In any case ATA100/133 drives are backwards compatible with the ATA33/66 bus on your MoBo so (except for the size restriction) you can install a much bigger drive (i.e. 80gig) for relatively cheaply. And I can't think of a reason not to do it.

jhelm007 · Jul 20, 2005

Racing666 said:
cheap SCSI hard drive around 40-80 gb,

I may be wrong here, but I don't think there is any such animal. There are large SCSI drives, but they ain't cheap.

D3v1L80Y · Jul 20, 2005

Racing666 said:
i read something about the OS has to be in the first 8 gb of the drive, but can I just use 1 partition if say i get a 40-80-120 gb drive? Or what would be the best way to do it?

You will need to make at least two partitions. One should be 8 GB or less, (7.5 GB is a good size), and you can use the rest for storage.
You will have to install OS X on the 8 GB volume.

If you plan on using Classic, I find it easier to make 3 partitions. One 8 GB for OS X, one 2 GB for OS 9 and the rest for storage/apps/etc.
This makes it easier if you should ever run into any problems with Classic, as you just have to wipe that partition and install again if necessary.

cradom · Jul 20, 2005

D3v1L80Y said:
You will need to make at least two partitions. One should be 8 GB or less, (7.5 GB is a good size), and you can use the rest for storage.
You will have to install OS X on the 8 GB volume.

Not true. I have a 120 gig ATA drive in my 400 with Tiger installed and it works fine. It is not partitioned, I have OS 9 on another drive (6 gig). Of course I'm using a Sonnett Tempo PCI card for the drives because mine is a rev. 1 and can't handle larger drives on the moboard controller.

I dont think the B&W suffers from the rom restriction that the older iMacs did. On my rev. D iMac I had to partition the drive (40 gig) and install X and 9 on the first 8 gig partition.

How or if you partition depends on how you use the drive.

Racing666 · Jul 21, 2005

cradom, how is the performance of the machine? and what 120 gb hard drive do you have? i wonder if i put the 120 on the mobo controller (i have rev 2), if it will run ok or be a slug...i only want to upgrade because i tried burning a DVD and it errored on me saying not enough space on hard drive...i only have a 9gb scsi hard drive, and 4.5gb is taken up by programs/OS 10.3.9..cheapest route for now would be good.. about $100 or less is what i got to spend on a new hard drive..i'll buy a controller card later since their about $50-$100 for a decent one..

cradom · Jul 21, 2005

Well, it's a little slow to boot because the pci card has to power up and then spin up the drives. The drive connected to the motherboard controller spins right up, but it's not a boot drive.

I have a Maxtor 6Y120LO drive. The system runs fine. Not as fast as 9.2.2 but very usable. Faster than earlier versions of X. At one time I had a triple boot...X 10.4.2, 9.2.2, and Yellowdog Linux. (That gets hairy if you dont know what you're doing :doctor: ).

I dont remember about the rev. 2's. Go here: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/

That Sonnett controller can handle 4 drives, tho you probably can't put 4 in the case. Mine has 3, the 120 and 2 6gigs.

spong · Jul 22, 2005

jhelm007 said:
I may be wrong here, but I don't think there is any such animal. There are large SCSI drives, but they ain't cheap.

I just bought a couple of IBM fileservers, which came with pairs of 33gb SCSI drives. You can certainly get them small, but like you said, they're not cheap.

I'm in Brazil, so it's hard to compare prices, but these 33gb units cost roughly 4 x the price of an equivalent 120gb IDE unit.

So, it's around 15 x the price per GB, if that makes sense.

B&W G3 LARGER HARD DRIVE

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