mdd hard drives

[shelbydodgeimp]

I have a dual 1.42ghz firewire800 mirror drive door g4 Powermac.

I am getting low on hard drive space (my work involves alot of large multimedia files) and am curious what the maximum hard drive capacity is for macs with 48bit addressing.

I currently have two 120GB hard drives on the ATA100 bus, and one 250gb on the ata66 bus, with a normal 48x cdrom and a superdrive on the ata33 bus (why did apple use ata33 in the days of 2003??).

I was wondering if I could throw a 500gb or larger in the ata66 bus, or better yet- replace my boot drive with the large drive and move the boot drive (one of the 120gb ata100s) onto the ata66 bus. I dont want to have to do a fresh OS install however, how hard would it be to "clone" my boot drive onto the larger drive (without particianing it)?

 

[bobw]

The MDD supports larger drives on the ATA-100 bus. You should be able to use any size.
The ATA-66 will only support drives up to 128GB.

You can use SuperDuper to clone your drive.

 

[shelbydodgeimp]

I have a 250 GB unparticianed on my ATA66 bus and it works fine.

So there isnt any top size limit on the ata100 bus, good to know.

 

[bobw]

Doubtfull you have an ATA-66 bus using a 250GB drive on it, and the full drive being recognized.

 

[shelbydodgeimp]

Mac OS 10.4 disagrees:

Unless you are saying that although it claims 7xgb is available, it wont actually let me put that much on the drive?

 

[bobw]

The first ATA Bus shown;

HDS722525VLAT80

is your ATA-100 Bus

 

[shelbydodgeimp]

Those bus's in apple system profiler do not appear to be in any order-

As it lists ata66 first, then ata33 (optical drives), then ata100.

At least, assuming 1) that the MB is labled correctly when I put the drives in and, 2) ata66 being the front HD carrier under the optical drives (with ATA100 being the rear most carrier by the CPU heat sink)

 

[shelbydodgeimp]

Here are more screenshots:

 

[bobw]

Yes, they are in order. The fastest bus is listed first (ATA-100), in your machine.

 

[shelbydodgeimp]

If they are in order, why is the optical drive bus in the middle?

The optical drives on the MDD are ATA33 which is the slowest bus.

 

[bobw]

Your system specs show it has only two Hard Drive ATA Bus's, ATA/66 and ATA/100.

One Optical drive bus - ATA-3

 

[shelbydodgeimp]

Right, but the oiptical drive bus is the slowest ATA bus so it *should* be listed last in Apple Sys Profiler-> ATA

 

[shelbydodgeimp]

Also, FYI according to the faq here:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=246391

In 2002, Apple adopted a newer IDE controller with the QuickSilver '2002' model that made use of 48-bit addressing, thus alleviating the 128GB barrier and allowing the use of IDE drives in excess of 250GBs+. If you own one of the following Power Macintosh models, you're free to roam the storage prairie with no restraints;

Power Macintosh G4 - QuickSilver '2002' (800MHz, 933MHz, Dual 1GHz)
Power Macintosh G4 - MDD '2002' (Dual 867MHz, Dual 1GHz, Dual 1.25GHz)
Power Macintosh G4 - MDD '2003' (Single 1GHz, Dual 1.25GHz, Dual 1.42GHz)

One common misconception is that ATA-100 or ATA-133 are necessary for large drive support. This is untrue. It just so happens that ATA-100/133 became prevalent at the same time as 48-bit LBA. Thus, pretty much all ATA-100/133 controllers have large drive support, but they are not one and the same.

The QuickSilver '2002' model featured an ATA-66 controller in conjunction with 48-bit addressing, and thus is capable of using large drives. The same goes for the secondary ATA-66 controller in MDD machines, which is also capable of supporting large drives.