PowerMac G4 800Mhz, Max HD size?
Hi folks,
I was wondering if anyone here knew how large of a ATA drive will be recognized by this machine? Fry's currently has a Seagate 1 TB ATA300 7200 RPM drive on sale for $100, and I'm really tempted. Thanks in advance.
Mutant Pie
Eeun,
Thanks for the response. I assume that I can partition the drive using the disk utility on the OS 10 install disk (in this case it would be OS 10.4)?
Mutant Pie
I'm pretty sure that 1TB drive is probably SATA which your G4 didn't ship with natively. So, you would have to use a add-in pci card which probably circumvents the need to partition in smaller sizes.
I just looked at Fry's site (we don't have Fry's up here) and the only 1 TB drives I could find were SATA. The largest PATA drive was 320 GB @ $49.
Getting a compatible drive would be important 
As an aside, it's not the best time to be buying drives. The flooding in Thailand has raised hard drive prices considerably, so even on sale you might not be getting as good a deal as you would by waiting several months. Before the flood, 1 TB drives had been $80-ish, and that's in Canada where there's usually at least a 10% price hike compared to the U.S. market.
Fastest PATA bus was ATA133, so it's got to be SATA. Thus, SATA PCI card for Mac--$60?--plus you'd have to buy an SATA cable and a molex to SATA power adapter for a computer that was left in the dust years ago, but maybe that doesn't matter. How much does a used G5 tower go for these days? The G5 used SATA. But even a G5 has no future. I think it was the second generation Quicksilver 867mhz that broke the 127GB barrier.
The alternative to a PCI SATA controller, for G4s that don't have the 128gb limitation, is a PATA->SATA adapter. My MDD is using a 750GB drive connected with a card similar to this one.
If I remember correctly the 800MHz single CPU Quicksilver was on the lowend of the 2002 variant. The Quicksilver 2002(800 933 dual 1GHz) supported large drives on it's internal channels, but not the original QS(733 867 dual 800).
Either way it is still nice to get a bootable SATA card in there. 
It gets confusing:
Yes, the G4 will support up to, IIRC, 2 terabytes. But you'll have to partition it.
You're limited to 127GB or about 200GB partitions depending on what you use to format it ( > OS X 10.2 for the latter).
"If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime."
(Unknown)