What is the max hard drive size which can be added to a dual 533 G4?

R

ramapa

Registered
Hi all,

The local Frys Electronics store has a very good deal for a Western Digital 160 GB drive (7200 RPM Ultra ATA) for $100 ... and it is so tempting to get one; however the Supervising Manager at the Mac dept in the same Fry's store was pretty sure that a G4 can recognize only upto 120 GB.

I could not really find any info on the apple website on this.

Does anyone out there have any information which would shed light on this?

Thanks,
Rama.
 
Originally posted by ramapa
Hi all,

The local Frys Electronics store has a very good deal for a Western Digital 160 GB drive (7200 RPM Ultra ATA) for $100 ... and it is so tempting to get one; however the Supervising Manager at the Mac dept in the same Fry's store was pretty sure that a G4 can recognize only upto 120 GB.
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Click to expand...

He is right, but for the wrong reason. Your G4 has an ATA100 controller (or possibly ATA66, but same problem either way) which is limited to max HD size of 137G. So, yes, in your stock DP533 you're limited to 137G HD, so the 160G will not work properly. But, you can purchase a mac compatible ATA133 controller card and then you can use drives larger then 137G. So, aG4 can, and do support 160G drives, assuming they have ATA133.

Brian
 
Don't forget the math here, The max partition for <ATA 6 is 137.4 Billion Bytes, which works out to 128 GBytes. Whew!, anyway if you're springing for a drive card to support that large drive, you may want to consider one that can also support serial ATA (Drives are currently more expensive, but will be faster, and larger, too)
 
Thanks guys for the info.

I actually have a Ultra ATA66 - which I now gather will definitely not work. I looked up some prices and http://www.sonnettech.com/product/pricelist.html#tempo133 comes in at $99... the total price of $200 definitely puts it out of what I want to spend... I guess I will go with the 120GB for now - that one is coming in for around .

Or maybe I should go for a firewire...:)

Thanks again.
 
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