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adding a new harddrive

B

burritos

macrumors member
Original poster
hi,

I'm a new poster and was wondering if anyone could be kind enough to answer this question. I have a G4 400Mhz AGP desktop. Can I add an additional hard drive, cause my 10Gig is nearing capacity. Would that be better than an external zip?

Thanks.
 
yes, you can. check the apple support site for help on how to, and what to buy. i added a 40 gig hard drive to my G3 tower about six months ago and it's great.

ZIP is much more expensive in terms of capacity etc.
 
Make sure you follow full safety precautions, like grounding yourself for static first - you don't want to accidently spark the motherboard or something. i would definitely go internal, removable disks are only good for carring data around anymore, not for long-term storage. and they're nowhere near as fast.

🙂
pnw
 
Thanks, but

does that mean I can only replace the existing drive, or can I add another drive?
 
You can have both. Make sure your new drive is set to 'slave', on top of bracket and in the middle connector on the short IDE cable.
Open Disk utility, then select the 'Erase" tab and format the new drive. Make sure you choose the option to "zero all data" in the options button. It will take MUCH longer (hours depending on size), but will make things more reliable in the future.
This site wont let me post a crude drawing of how it all should look. I'll add it to the site above/below. See if it helps:

http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/...tefn=TKSite.4.xml&aff=consumer&cty=US&lang=en
 
Something's not totally right...

I screwed in the new ata drive on top of the the old drive and attached the ribbon in to the new drive. Should it show up on the desktop? I also checked the disk utility and there's no new formattable drive to be seen.

Question, is there a power cord to be plugged in to the drive also? I saw an out let for one, but it doesn't reach the new drive. Any suggestions.
 
The new drive will not showup until you plug the power into it.
To get power to it you can always disconnect other power cables and reattach them in a way that they all reach to the needed drives.. OR... you can go to microcenter and get an extension for the power cable. they'll also sell splitters (Y-cables) for the power cable... those will work too, but might not give you the length you need. good luck!

🙂
 
One last question...

Thanks for all your guys' help. When I reformat with the Disk utility should I do OS standard or OS extended?
 
Should I partition the HD?

I've got 80 g's now. Should I partition it? If so what would be the advatage of doing that?
 
Wow...

You have to partition it, if you're using it you've already done so. I tend to just keep it as one big partition, but breaking it up into two 40's or whatever will work also.. just depends how you want to use it.
 
Re: Should I partition the HD?

Originally posted by burritos
I've got 80 g's now. Should I partition it? If so what would be the advantage of doing that?
Click to expand...
The way I like to do it, which is just the way I prefer and not the national correct standard or something, is like so:
1- OSX and Apps 15-20GB Part*
2- OSIX and it's Apps 7GB Part
3- The rest Data Partition

*I'm actually using a SCSI drive for OSX but you get the idea.

If you need to wipe out X, no problem. If you need to wipe out 9, no problem. If you need to re format where your Data is, that's cool too. In any case, the rest of the stuff stays intact.
Again, this may or may not be what's good for you. Think of what *you* need.
 
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