Upgrading internal drive - advice?

B

bunner bob

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I've got a G4 933 (Quicksilver) with the original 60 GB drive and an additional 80 GB. Currently the OS and my applications live on the 60 GB, and the 80 GB is split up with partitions for mp3s, digital pix, work stuff (design), video files, etc - I have about 5 partitions going. Well, now I'm finding I like keeping some things (namely mp3s and digital pix) in my 'official' OS X-created folders within my User directory. So the 60-gigger is filling up fast. Now I'm thinking I'll just get a big fat drive to replace the 60, keep most of my stuff on it, and keep the 80 in there for a spare boot drive and extra whatnot.

I can get a Western Digital Caviar 250 GB drive for under $200. The questions are:

1. I'm inclined to not partition it at all, given that previous attempts to guess the eventual filling rate of partitions have been grossly in error (i.e. I fill up the digital pix and mp3 partitions, and the video partition is empty). Is this a bad idea?

2. I read elsewhere here that a big drive increases bootup time. Not really an issue since I rarely reboot, but how big an increase are we talking about?

3. I've been thinking about just cloning my existing boot drive onto the new one using Carbon Copy Cloner, but on the other hand, have this vague historical impression that it's better to install a fresh system. And then there are all the apps. And prefs files. Fair amount of fuss. Should I install everything fresh, or clone some stuff but not other, or just clone the whole thang. Note that I WILL of course be repairing permissions and running DiskWarrior 2 on both drives before doing any cloning - if that changes the answer.

4. Any preferred drives, or drives to be avoided? The WD above is an Ultra ATA 133, and looks good on paper anyway. I'll assume it has jumpers for master/slave, since the Quicksilver won't do cable select. Any advice on this one?

Thanks in advance!

- Bob
 
bunner bob said:
I can get a Western Digital Caviar 250 GB drive for under $200.
Click to expand...

Tiger Direct has a WD 200gb drive for $90 right now after rebate. They also have a nice Hitachi 250gb drive for $155 and a WD 250gb drive for $180.

ATA100 and ATA133 drives will run the same on G4 systems with the stock card as the Quicksilvers are ATA66. Knowing that I'd worry more about the size limit the G4 has...it's 128gb for a drive. In order to use the extra space on a drive over 128gb in size you'll need to get a new controller card that's ATA100 or ATA133.
 
Interesting. According to the G4 manual I can use up to ATA-6 drives, but according to Sys. Profiler the card is ATA-4.

Who makes a card? Anything tricky about changing to a different controller?

- Bob
 
I think the Mirrored Drive Door model was the first that can use the larger size drives.
 
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