Upgrading hard drive in G4

[gollum84]

I am running out of hard drive space, since I do alot of illustrations and starting to do video work, and want to install a second drive in my computer. I have a 1GHz PowerMac G4 FW800 tower. In the manual it says I can install an Ultra ATA/100, Ultra ATA/66 or Ultra ATA device. I am looking to get a 200 or 300 GB hard drive, so my questions are...

Can I install an Ultra ATA/133 drive?
Will the size of the drive be less than actually stated?
Where is the best place to buy a hard drive for the lowest price?

 

[DeltaMac]

Can I install an Ultra ATA/133 drive?
Will the size of the drive be less than actually stated?
Where is the best place to buy a hard drive for the lowest price?

Yes, an Ultra ATA/133 drive will work fine.

No, the size as seen by your computer will be the stated size. If you choose the 300 GB size - which is sold as a decimal size, the computer will report the binary size - which would be about 279 GB. The two numbers are mathematically equivalent.

 

[gollum84]

Thanks for the reply. I didn't want to buy a 133 drive and find out that my computer couldn't use it.

 

[Factor41]

If you have an ATA100 controller, the ATA133 drive will just run slower I believe?

As I said on another thread, I'm a space-crazed graphics user the route I took was to get a Serial-ATA card. I had a 40Gb and 80Gb on my internal ATA bus so added a Sonnet Tempo 2-channel card (cheaper than the RAID options) and stuck a 200GB drive on that. Now my 40Gb drive is getting a bit rickety (it was the original drive when I got my mac - G4/867), it's making way for a 160Gb S-ATA drive and hopefully a bit of a performance increase. Faster interface will keep your video apps happy too.