Upgrading an older mac

R

rschapel

macrumors member

Original poster

• Mar 2, 2004

• #1

A friend of mine has a G3 233 powermac, it currently has a 4g drive in it, and while he is happy with the performance, he is looking for more space. I haven't seen the machine yet (its a work friend), what size drive can this older mac handle? Any advice? Honest he is happy with the speed, just looking for more space...


--Randy

 

applemacdude

macrumors 68040

• Mar 2, 2004

• #2

rschapel said:

A friend of mine has a G3 233 powermac, it currently has a 4g drive in it, and while he is happy with the performance, he is looking for more space. I haven't seen the machine yet (its a work friend), what size drive can this older mac handle? Any advice? Honest he is happy with the speed, just looking for more space...


--Randy

Click to expand...

It can handle any reasonable HD upgrade. I think it was up to 2TB or something.

 

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020

• Mar 2, 2004

• #3

applemacdude said:

It can handle any reasonable HD upgrade. I think it was up to 2TB or something.

Click to expand...

However, it might be SCSI. Higher prices, lower capacity.

 

blue&whiteman

macrumors 65816

• Mar 2, 2004

• #4

the beige G3 only has external scsi capability I think. the internal HD bus is an older IDE with a max tranfer rate of 16MB/sec (its the technology that existed just before ultra ata/33). on this bus you should be able to use any modern ata drive under 137GB. since there are no 137GB drives you could go up to a 120GB. my blue and white has ata/33 and I run 2 drives off it (maxtor 6GB and western dig. 120GB) just fine. I want to add an ata/133 pci card soon to speed up things like app launching and to use the ata/100 speed of the wd drive. maybe your friend could think about this also.

 

tomf87

macrumors 65816

• Mar 2, 2004

• #5

At www.xlr8yourmac.com, it appears there are many people dropping 80GB drives in the Beige G3. Don't know if it will be the same for the G3 All-In-One which also ran at 233/266 Mhz.

 

J

jamall

macrumors regular

• Mar 2, 2004

• #6

An excellent program called MacTracker has all the info you could ever need (such as internal bus types) on every Mac ever made.

 

D

DrBoar

macrumors member

• Mar 4, 2004

• #7

While the beige G3 do take larger HDs it will only work with a booting partition on the first 4 or was it 8 GB so larger HDs has to be partioned to work on the internal IDE. xlr8youmac is a good site for the particulars