going over rated hard drive capacity?

[tagraves]

I have a dual 1.8gz G5, the version with 8 RAM slots instead of 4. The technical information from Apple says that the maximum internal capacity of the machine is 500gb of hard drive space. Currently I have two SATA drives installed in the 2 bays, a 160gb and a 250gb drive, and I use a couple external FW ATA drives as well.

I'm thinking of expanding, though, with an SATA PCI card and then some external SATA drives, but I'm wondering about this capacity issue. If I end up making my total SATA capacity over 500gb (and maybe well over that, depending on what size drives I buy) is that going to cause more problems than it solves? Ideally I'd love to hook up a couple of 500gb SATA drives externally, and have one open PCI slot where I could install the card.

This is an issue for me because I am a photographer generating about 15-20 gigs of data per week, and I'm having to rely on the external drives more and more for short- and long-term storage and use with Photoshop and Lightroom and other apps. I find that even the 1894 firewire drives I have are slower than I'd like. I'd love to go ahead and buy a new Mac Pro and load it with RAM and high-capacity drives, but that's at least a year away for me.

Thanks for the help and advice!

 

[sinclair_tm]

you miss read that. all that 500gig means is that the biggest drive apple sold them with that that big, not that the mac can only read 500gig worth of drive space. there is no max size limit on sata drives that i know of. so you can put 2 700gig drives in your mac, and plug as many drives in the back as you want, and the mac will see and use them all.