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

1st post, 2 questions!

F

fujimi442

macrumors member
Original poster
First I will give a short background of my computer usage. I had a 300 mhz pc that I got for free from my uncle, I decided to make this pc more of a net browser and mp3 player, so I bought a sb audigy ex and an external usb2 60gig harddrive. 3/4 of a year later I want to throw that thing out the window, I was having some problems so I decided to do a clean install with 2000 pro. Well ever since then it hasn't got any better and I hate it with a passion, it is sitting next to me right now and I feal like kicking it. I just found out that I will be going to Tokyo Japan for school this Feburary so I needed a laptop. I did some searching for a pc notebook, didnt really see anything that caught my eye....... THEN I SAW THE POWERBOOK G4.... I fell in love, so I took out a loan and bought one. I am very happy, I am slightly worried about how long my g4 667 will be up to audio/video and gaming standards. Anyway, on to my questions:

Question 1: I have nearly 50gigs of movies and mp3s on my external hard drive, It says it is mac compatible, and I installed the drivers. When I plug it in and turn it on I get an error message that says there are no readable volumes on the hard drive. What should I do??

Question 2: What is the difference between gigafloops and GHz??


thanks alot
 
congrats on the TiBook!! 😀

i think that you might need to reformat your HD as HFS+ for your TiBook to be able to read it.

but i'm guessing that there would be a work around...

and as for gigaflops, i think there is an explanaion on Apple's website. you could try using the dictionary in Sherlock...

good luck.🙂
 
Your HD may be Mac compatible, but it is not currently in a Mac readable format. You will need to hook the HD up to a PC, share the files on it, then copy them onto your Mac.

Gigaflops is a measure of instructions executed. FLOPS stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second. Giga is a prefix like mega etc. Megahertz is a measure of cycles per second. The G4 gets more done per clock cycle, so although G4s are not as high up in the MHz department as P4s or Athlons, they still get a lot of work done. If you took a 1.25 GHz G4 and a 1.25 GHz P4 (did they make them that slow? I think that may have been the very low end?) you would find the P4 would get it's proverbials punched out. That's really what the "MHz myth" is all about.
 
Originally posted by Beej
Your HD may be Mac compatible, but it is not currently in a Mac readable format. You will need to hook the HD up to a PC, share the files on it, then copy them onto your Mac.

Gigaflops is a measure of instructions executed. FLOPS stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second. Giga is a prefix like mega etc. Megahertz is a measure of cycles per second. The G4 gets more done per clock cycle, so although G4s are not as high up in the MHz department as P4s or Athlons, they still get a lot of work done. If you took a 1.25 GHz G4 and a 1.25 GHz P4 (did they make them that slow? I think that may have been the very low end?) you would find the P4 would get it's proverbials punched out. That's really what the "MHz myth" is all about.
Click to expand...

It's not so much how much it does per clock cycle since with any cpu only one operation happens per cycle. (One stage of the pipeline executed per cycle) The biggest thing is the latest P4s have a 20 stage pipeline. The current G4s have a 7 stage pipeline. Since each stage in a pipeline takes one cycle a P4 would have to be at 3x the speed of a G4 to get a single operation through the pipeline and done. This is a gross oversimplification but should be easily understandable.
 
...

Could the fact be that the drive is USB 2.0 have to do with any of it? I dunno the whole "backwards compatibility" thing, so I'm making a guess. Any rate, congrats again on the Tibook. I got myself one and have been in love since!
 
Originally posted by MacBandit


It's not so much how much it does per clock cycle since with any cpu only one operation happens per cycle. (One stage of the pipeline executed per cycle) The biggest thing is the latest P4s have a 20 stage pipeline. The current G4s have a 7 stage pipeline. Since each stage in a pipeline takes one cycle a P4 would have to be at 3x the speed of a G4 to get a single operation through the pipeline and done. This is a gross oversimplification but should be easily understandable.
Click to expand...
Uh yeah, I realise that 🙂 I guess if yours was an oversimplification, mine was an overoversimplification 😀
 
thanks for the replies! I dont think it has to do with it being usb2 because it is backwards compatible. I will try hooking it up to my pc and sharing the files after class today. I have one more question regarding Gigaflops VS GHz. I heard someone saying " it depends on wether you need gigaflops or ghz " when asked which is better ; pc or mac. Is there any truth to this, if so, what did he mean by that??? or is this guy just blowing hot air?

thanks again
 
Originally posted by fujimi442
thanks for the replies! I dont think it has to do with it being usb2 because it is backwards compatible. I will try hooking it up to my pc and sharing the files after class today. I have one more question regarding Gigaflops VS GHz. I heard someone saying " it depends on wether you need gigaflops or ghz " when asked which is better ; pc or mac. Is there any truth to this, if so, what did he mean by that??? or is this guy just blowing hot air?

thanks again
Click to expand...

This guy sounds like he is blowing hot air. If this is how he said this then he doesn't have a clue. Gigaflops is simply a certain measurement of a certain kind of floating point operations. Basically math calculations. The G4 chips altivec unit excels at these operations thus the very high numbers into the gigaflop range rather then simply megaflops. A CPUs measurement of true speed has nothing to do with gigaflops or GHz. It's all in how it performs for the user this has a lot to do with how the software you normally use is written and how well it takes advantage of the cpus strong points. What I tell most people is to sit down with the computers they are considering buying and try using them how they would normally. If the machine always seems one step ahead of you then it's probably more then fast enough. Not all computer stores will let you do what I'm describing but all the Apple computer stores corporate or not have let me.
 
Originally posted by MacBandit


This guy sounds like he is blowing hot air. If this is how he said this then he doesn't have a clue. Gigaflops is simply a certain measurement of a certain kind of floating point operations. Basically math calculations. The G4 chips altivec unit excels at these operations thus the very high numbers into the gigaflop range rather then simply megaflops. A CPUs measurement of true speed has nothing to do with gigaflops or GHz. It's all in how it performs for the user this has a lot to do with how the software you normally use is written and how well it takes advantage of the cpus strong points. What I tell most people is to sit down with the computers they are considering buying and try using them how they would normally. If the machine always seems one step ahead of you then it's probably more then fast enough. Not all computer stores will let you do what I'm describing but all the Apple computer stores corporate or not have let me.
Click to expand...

You know, that guy blowing hot air was probably me. I was asking whether I should get a VPR or a powerbook...I was going to run some stuff I complied myself, and I was wondering if the gigaflops idea applied to me. Its all cleared up tho' 😉
 
Originally posted by Over Achiever


You know, that guy blowing hot air was probably me. I was asking whether I should get a VPR or a powerbook...I was going to run some stuff I complied myself, and I was wondering if the gigaflops idea applied to me. Its all cleared up tho' 😉
Click to expand...


That's cool. I'm not here to create enemies or single anyone out for being an idiot. I just want to help people by answering there questions.🙂
 
beej, i tried what you said but i didnt see anything other than network settings that had anything to do with sharing. I tried using it on os9 and it worked just fine, any ideas why it wont work on osx??? I have diskwarrior but for some reason it wont recognize the drive, so i cant do anything with that.


On another note, I was sooooooo pissed yesterday when i found out about the new pb 1gig. I havent even had this for over a week and apple doesnt sell it anymore🙁 oh well, life goes on, im over it now.
 
OK, what you need to do is:
1. Hook the HD up to a PC.
2. Using the PC, put everything on your external HD into the one folder and sahre it. (There may be a better way than this, but this way works.)
3. Connect your Mac and the PC with an ethernet crossover cable (or some other method).
4. Using your Mac, running OS X, type command-K in the finder.
5. You will see the shared folder that contains all your shared stuff on your external HD. Double-click it to mount it as a drive. Depending on your settings, the drive will mount on your desktop. If it doesn't, type command-shift-C in the finder.
6. Double click the drive's icon. Viola, there's all your stuff!

Couldn't be easier, could it? *cough cough*

But trust me, it used to be a whole lot more icky (icky being the technical term for it...)
 
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