Adding new HD to B/W G3, what the largest I can get?

[ASP272]

I'm adding a new hard drive to a blue and white G3 and I'm wondering what the maximum hard drive size can be. When I added a 160gb internal drive to my Powermac G4 450 AGP I found out that it only could read 128gb of the drive. Should I assume that the B/W G3, which has a 100mhz motherboard also, is exactly the same way, or is it worse? When I bought my 160gb HD it came with a PC only 133mhz EIDE PCI card, which didn't help any. Does anyone know of a HD that comes with a Mac compatible PCI card for installation? Thanks!

 

[link92]

128GB is max, although in theory you can get two of them and use software RAID to give yourself 256GB

 

[CanadaRAM]

I'm adding a new hard drive to a blue and white G3 and I'm wondering what the maximum hard drive size can be. When I added a 160gb internal drive to my Powermac G4 450 AGP I found out that it only could read 128gb of the drive. Should I assume that the B/W G3, which has a 100mhz motherboard also, is exactly the same way, or is it worse? When I bought my 160gb HD it came with a PC only 133mhz EIDE PCI card, which didn't help any. Does anyone know of a HD that comes with a Mac compatible PCI card for installation? Thanks!

You can buy software to make larger drives recognizable (check Vesiontracker, can't remember the name at the moment), or you can buy a Mac-compatible P-ATA card. Don't see many drives nowadays bundles with ATA/133 (133 MB/s, not MHz) cards, this was a gimmick used by Maxtor several years ago because nobody else was producing ATA/133 drives.

 

[ASP272]

You can buy software to make larger drives recognizable (check Vesiontracker, can't remember the name at the moment), or you can buy a Mac-compatible P-ATA card. Don't see many drives nowadays bundles with ATA/133 (133 MB/s, not MHz) cards, this was a gimmick used by Maxtor several years ago because nobody else was producing ATA/133 drives.

Thanks for the correction on the 133 mhz, my mistake. And thanks for the tip on the versiontracker software, I'll look it up.

 

[ASP272]

128GB is max, although in theory you can get two of them and use software RAID to give yourself 256GB

Thanks!

 

[spinne1]

Do yourself a favor and just get a 120 GB drive (or two). I have gone the route of using Intech's software to get around the limit and for the B & W G3 it has a serious flaw: you must use the slower IDE bus on your motherboard for it to work, and if you use two hard drives, both must be hooked to the slower IDE bus. This sucks because your hard drive access times may be slower, although I don't know if in the real world it makes a difference because perhaps other bottlenecks slow down the real world access times to the point where it does not matter if you are on the faster bus or the slower bus.

It also sucks because you can only access the space above 128 GB as a new partition, not as one big partition for your whole drive size. [For example, I have a 200 GB drive with 128 GB and 62 GB partitions]

Anyhow, the Intech software is here:

http://www.speedtools.com/ATA6.shtml

 

[ASP272]

Do yourself a favor and just get a 120 GB drive (or two).

I looked at intechs software and that is definitely not for me. I hate having to partition drives, especially when the software only works when you are started up from the drive with it installed. I did think of just getting a 120 gb drive, but then realized a 120 gb would be a bit less after formatting, whereas if I get a 160 gb I can get the full 128gb readable. CompUSA has a 160gb for $30 after rebates today only. I'm going to grab one of those. (It's a 7200 Hitachi too!). Thanks for the advice.