Thinking of buying a second hand Powermac G4, a few questions.

Ahoy, I'm thinking of buying an old tower system for a number of uses, mainly as a file server, streaming server (connected to my 360), additional rendering resources for small video projects (don't need anything particularly powerful for this), and general small network management.

I have my eye on a dual 450mhz machine with 1.5gb of RAM. It has a pretty teeny HD though. Hence my first question:

Will http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-ATA133 work in providing me with more IDE slots, and allow me to use HDs larger than 128gb?

Second; how many HDs could I fit in there, along with the supplied DVD drive?
And thirdly; would http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-320XR1 work? I'd like to be able to have it on two networks at once.

Any help is much appreciated.

Hi and welcome! Your G4 does have the 128 gig drive limit so you will need an IDE card. The tricky part is that I have seen G4s that won't boot off of the drives connected to a card, they had to have a 128 gig drive with OS X connected to the MoBo IDE bus.
I am not familiar with that particular card, but if it is really cheap, it may not work with a Mac. Saving a couple of dollars (or pounds!) may end up being more expensive in terms of headaches. Ditto for the ethernet card. Good luck!

As a suggestion, purchase the highest spec machine you can afford.

If you envisage installing Leopard down the track, now is the time to look for a Quicksiklver 933/1GHz DP or an 867DP+ MDD. The extra dollars now will be a saving later.

Unfortunately my budget doesn't stretch quite that high at the moment, and so I've acquired myself a G4 Graphite. It's only a 450mhz, but the CPU upgrades are fairly cheap, and if I find myself wanting for more power it shouldn't be difficult to upgrade.
It's a 450mhz, 1.25gb of RAM, 60gb HD, with the bonus of an SCSI card which I can sell to recoup some of the money (depending on how good it is). Cost me £56 including postage, so not too bad.

The Generic IDE card won't work, you will need one with Mac specific firmware. I've been impressed with my ACARD IDE card in my G4 Powermac.