Hard Drive upgrade?

richs2k1

Registered
I want to do some video editing on my old PowerMac G4 400mhz and am in need of a larger hard drive. According to AppleSpec the hard drive interface on the motherboard is ATA-66. Do I need to buy an ATA-66 drive or could I purchase one that is ATA-100 or ATA-133? I get so confused when it comes to hard drive interface connections and namings. From what I've read ATA and IDE are one in the same but there are several flavors of each.

What would be the best option to upgrade to a 250gb drive? Should I purchase a hard drive controller to use a serial or ATA-133/ATA-100 drive and then purchase a compatible model? Or, should I not waste the money for the controller and find an older large ATA-66 model? Also, what would happen if I installed an ATA-133 drive in my existing computer without purchasing a controller?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Rich
 
ATA-100 or ATA-133 will both work, backwards compatible.

Your machine can only use a drive with a 128GB capacity. To use a larger drive, you need to add an ATA/IDE PCI Controller card.

If you put a drive in larger than 128GB without a controller card, the machine will only see 128GB of the drive.
 
Ok, thanks for answering my question. I read there are software workarounds that will allow the machine to see the drive which I may try.
Thanks,
Rich
 
I would highly recommend purchasing an ATA PCI card to drive a hard drive larger than 137GB rather than use a software hack solution. In addition to native large drive support, you'll also get much faster read/write times -- something that the software hack cannot provide.
 
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