Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

The Holy Grail of IDE Hard Drives

bunnspecial

bunnspecial

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 3, 2014
8,391
6,565
Kentucky
I'm not sure if such a title exists, but if it does I'm pretty sure this is it.

Found in a drawer today that was getting cleaned out preparing for a move at work. I was told to take it after I got all the data off and wiped it. SMART shows about 100 hours of use, and interestingly enough it's jumpered at 32gb(a waste of a really good drive).
 

Attachments

  • image.jpeg
    image.jpeg
    1.2 MB · Views: 255
Yes, they are. I happened to find a guy selling off a large stack of drives and an old XServe. I only had enough money to buy six drives at the time. Now all six are in my MDD and function as storage drives for all the data I pick up.
 
I'd say the holy grail of PATA hard drives would be the 750GB sizes. There's a box of them at work for Deathraker's XRAID. Most of them are new, plus the 14 in the XRAID and a few dead or failing ones. But those 500GB drives are still nice and uncommon.
 
Intell said:
I'd say the holy grail of PATA hard drives would be the 750GB sizes. There's a box of them at work for Deathraker's XRAID. Most of them are new, plus the 14 in the XRAID and a few dead or failing ones. But those 500GB drives are still nice and uncommon.
Click to expand...

I didn't know anyone made a 750gb...I thought that they topped out at 500. That's good information to know.

Even so, I was very happy to get this one!
 
bunnspecial said:
I'm not sure if such a title exists, but if it does I'm pretty sure this is it.

Found in a drawer today that was getting cleaned out preparing for a move at work. I was told to take it after I got all the data off and wiped it. SMART shows about 100 hours of use, and interestingly enough it's jumpered at 32gb(a waste of a really good drive).
Click to expand...

I happen to have two 500GB IDE Seagate drives. Even though I hate Seagate, it really surprised me that we have them. I thought it would be fun to put one inside an older computer xD But no point anyway. I COULD have a total of 1TB of storage in half the HD bays in that machine, plus maybe some extra in the frontal bays. Too bad my G4 MDD was crashing with more than one HD in it. Maybe it had to do something with the "spin down hard disks" preference. I don't know...

('wow' at Intell's mentioning of the 750GB ones).
 
Last edited:
As late as September 2009 I was shopping WD Scorpio Blue drives for my PowerBook. Got a 320GB one for my birthday at Fry's Electronics, but noticed they had stock out the wazoo of these 500GB PATA drives for desktops. All at reasonable prices.

Now I wish I'd picked up one or two because after that date I never same them for sale there again. Must have been Fry's trying to move the last of their stock I guess.
 
Tbh you can just get a SATA drive with a $3 adapter for less. The same is trickier with notebook drives because of the lack of room.
 
weckart said:
Tbh you can just get a SATA drive with a $3 adapter for less. The same is trickier with notebook drives because of the lack of room.
Click to expand...

I've found this very difficult to do in most G4 towers due to lack of space between the drives and either the logic board or PSU(depending on which exact G4 we are talking about). Also, many adapters put the power supple plug at an odd angle(perpendicular to the drive) that makes getting power to more than one drive in the cage difficult.
 
I went with a SATA card in my G4 tower and I think it was worth it. But for those of us who collect old machines it's really handy to have a big IDE drive around, especially now when you can still occasionally find them as new-old stock if you look hard enough.
 
Last edited:
bunnspecial said:
I've found this very difficult to do in most G4 towers due to lack of space between the drives and either the logic board or PSU(depending on which exact G4 we are talking about). Also, many adapters put the power supple plug at an odd angle(perpendicular to the drive) that makes getting power to more than one drive in the cage difficult.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I can see the issue with the cages at the bottom of my Quicksilvers. That would be a very snug fit. Not so much with the space currently occupied by a dead Zip drive under the Superdrive. For the rest, I would just get laptop SATA drives with desktop IDE adapters. I think these exist. That would make the job easier. Just need to get suitable spacers to fit in the 3.5" racks.
 
2x 500GB IDE Seagate Barracuda drives (from some external HD bay)

These came from some external LaCie drive enclosure that we used to use, and the drivers were labeled as being dead... but I plugged them in to my computer and they turned on and even mounted to my desktop. I was able to format them and everything. I haven't tested them to boot an OS, but it would be kinda cool to stick one of these inside an old Mac. Any other Mac that can natively support this, besides an MDD? Probably better to put these in a Mac than in the drawer where they currently reside.

P.S. I hate Seagate, but whatcha' gonna do?
 

Attachments

  • Picture 1.png
    Picture 1.png
    874.4 KB · Views: 109
  • Picture 2.png
    Picture 2.png
    557.9 KB · Views: 98
  • Picture 3.png
    Picture 3.png
    1.5 MB · Views: 103
PowerMac G4 MDD said:
These came from some external LaCie drive enclosure that we used to use, and the drivers were labeled as being dead... but I plugged them in to my computer and they turned on and even mounted to my desktop. I was able to format them and everything. I haven't tested them to boot an OS, but it would be kinda cool to stick one of these inside an old Mac. Any other Mac that can natively support this, besides an MDD? Probably better to put these in a Mac than in the drawer where they currently reside.

P.S. I hate Seagate, but whatcha' gonna do?
Click to expand...
They'll run in a Quicksilver. The late revision board supports large drives. The board I have in mine is an earlier version so, it does not, but Intech's ATA HiCap driver is a workaround for G4s and G3s that do not support large drives.

I bought it in 2009 when I discovered my 400mhz TiBook did not support large drives and I've installed it in every Mac I've used since then that needed it. It's seamless.
 
2002 Quicksilvers and some later iMac G4s can use the full capacity natively. I'm running a 250 and 160 in my Quicksilver at the moment.

I know Intell has posted that there are ways to get many other systems to recognize them at full capacity, but don't know offhand what those ways are.

It's also worth mentioning that you can use them as is-you are just stuck with only using the first 128gb. If you are doing that, you should format them in the computer where they will be used.

I'm not the biggest Seagate fan either, but have generally had good luck with the Barracuda 7200 rpm drives. I certainly wouldn't turn them down-especially in that capacity!
 
Any Key Largo controller will read those drives at full capacity, once LBA-48 is enabled. The limitation is OpenFirmware and how it will only boot from the first 128GB of the drive.
 
eyoungren said:
They'll run in a Quicksilver. The late revision board supports large drives. The board I have in mine is an earlier version so, it does not, but Intech's ATA HiCap driver is a workaround for G4s and G3s that do not support large drives.

I bought it in 2009 when I discovered my 400mhz TiBook did not support large drives and I've installed it in every Mac I've used since then that needed it. It's seamless.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I checked on MacTracker which ones have native support.

Wow, that's pretty cool. Does that forcer work for an iMac G3? I am sure it would overheat with some huge drive, but it would be pretty cool. How does it enable it anyway? I thought large drive support depends solely on the hardware, and that it cannot be changed. Well, I guess that could have been said about Apple's select PPC computers that could only mirror their displays with a second monitor, and not extend the desktop---because there is actually a forcer for that. (but it seems really sketchy). I think it's called Screen Doctor or something of that sort.
 
PowerMac G4 MDD said:
Yeah, I checked on MacTracker which ones have native support.

Wow, that's pretty cool. Does that forcer work for an iMac G3? I am sure it would overheat with some huge drive, but it would be pretty cool. How does it enable it anyway? I thought large drive support depends solely on the hardware, and that it cannot be changed. Well, I guess that could have been said about Apple's select PPC computers that could only mirror their displays with a second monitor, and not extend the desktop---because there is actually a forcer for that. (but it seems really sketchy). I think it's called Screen Doctor or something of that sort.
Click to expand...
I don't know for certain exactly how it works, but there is a driver that gets installed at boot time. It works with the system allowing it to see the remainder of the drive capacity beyond 128.

Intech suggests partitioning your drive. One 128GB partition and another for the rest. That way you aren't stuck if the OS fails and you can't load the driver.

However, once the driver is installed, Disk Utility sees the full capacity and can format it as one drive if you wish. It works for 10.2.1 and above. So, presumably you'd be able to use it in a G3. The driver does not need to be installed on the drive(s) you are installing it for, only the OS X boot disk. You select which drives you want the driver to apply to when you install it and it comes with an app that lets you change that if you like.

The other thing you mention is ScreenSpanning Sync.
 
PowerMac G4 MDD said:
I happen to have two 500GB IDE Seagate drives. Even though I hate Seagate, it really surprised me that we have them. I thought it would be fun to put one inside an older computer xD But no point anyway. I COULD have a total of 1TB of storage in half the HD bays in that machine, plus maybe some extra in the frontal bays. Too bad my G4 MDD was crashing with more than one HD in it. Maybe it had to do something with the "spin down hard disks" preference. I don't know...

('wow' at Intell's mentioning of the 750GB ones).
Click to expand...

Why do you hate Seagate? Is something wrong with their quality? I thought they were the top hard drive manufacturer.
 
poiihy said:
Why do you hate Seagate? Is something wrong with their quality? I thought they were the top hard drive manufacturer.
Click to expand...
Seagate used to have that reputation. They were eclipsed by Western Digital a long time ago.

They are prone to failure.
 
eyoungren said:
Seagate used to have that reputation. They were eclipsed by Western Digital a long time ago.

They are prone to failure.
Click to expand...

But Seagate bought out Maxtor and Maxtor purchased Quantum's hard drive stuff... I would think Seagate would be experienced?
What about WD? Are they better than seagate?
What is the best one?
 
weckart said:
Yeah, I can see the issue with the cages at the bottom of my Quicksilvers. That would be a very snug fit. Not so much with the space currently occupied by a dead Zip drive under the Superdrive. For the rest, I would just get laptop SATA drives with desktop IDE adapters. I think these exist. That would make the job easier. Just need to get suitable spacers to fit in the 3.5" racks.
Click to expand...

My problem is that I actually use the zip drive in my Quicksilver from time to time so don't want to give it up :)

I play with old Macs enough that Zip disks remain a really handy medium for transferring files around. Even when you're working with a computer that has USB ports, an IDE Zip drive is often faster than using a flash drive over USB 1.1. Plus, it lets you transfer files to pre-USB computers.

I really just need to get a SATA card and throw a couple of big SATA drives in my Quicksilver just for storage...

BTW, as far as HDD brands go-

I spent a while last night sorting through my hard drive stock for targets to take to the range tomorrow. Basically, I used an external power supply to spin up the drive and listen to it-I didn't try mounting or examining to see if they were actually good. I was just checking for spin up(working drive motor) and then the "click of death." Out of a dozen dead drives that I found, I think there were two Western Digitals, a Quantum Fireball, and a large capacity Maxtor(the Maxtor actually seems fine until you start trying to put data on it-then the permissions self-destruct). The balance were IBM/Hitachi Deskstars.

I checked probably 60 drives last night and had a pretty decent, even distribution of Seagate, Maxtor, Quantum(I'm including the drives marked "Maxtor" but of obvious Quantum design in the Quantum total), Western Digital, and IBM/Hitachi. Most had manufacture dates of roughly 1998-2004. Based on my limited sample size, I think that the "Deathstar" nickname these carried for several years was probably well deserved.

I'd have to double check, but I think that the 15,000RPM SAS drives in my NAS are Seagate, and they've been nothing but reliable. I have a bunch of spares, but have not needed to replace one.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I'll throw it out again-a Quantum hard drive spinning up and operating brings back a lot of good memories for me. I'm sorry that they're no longer around.

I think that all hard drive brands have their ups and downs. Western Digital has been around awhile. As mentioned above, Seagate has acquired a bunch of companies, although they've been around as a proper hard drive maker for a while too(the original, still working drive in my c.1990 386 is a Seagate). Maxtor was always known for having high capacity per price, but I don't think that their reliability was the best. Quantum was known for speed(hence the "Fireball" name) but reliability was sometimes spotty. My perception is that Seagate has always had a good reputation in enterprise-class drives, but consumer drives have been hit or miss over the years. As I said, my opinion of recent Seagate stuff(i.e. the past 10 years) is generally favorable.
 
Last edited:
gavinstubbs09 said:
I've had absolute horrible luck with WD. Seagate is the most solid drive for me, and don't even mention Toshiba. Those drives are total crap and fail left and right.
Click to expand...
Seagate used to be the drive you'd find in the G4s. I've worked with those Macs in a professional occupation since 1999 and have had the opposite experience than you. WD has always been solid, but the Seagate drives…

I agree with you on Toshiba. And Hitachi. Both suck!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back