G3 B&W and G4 Sawtooth HD question.

[supachicken]

Hello,

I think I have read somewhere that 120GB HDD is the max size supported internal HD for the G4 Sawtooth and 2GB RAM was the max RAM? I just wanted to find out if this was correct.

Also, I have my B&W G3 that I want to turn into a media center so does anyone know the maximum ammount of HD this will support and RAM too.

Thanks guys.

 

[yippy]

That is correct for the sawtooth, I think, it might be only 1.5Gb of ram though. The B&W I think is the same.

 

[supachicken]

Hi,

I read that it was 1.5GB RAM but then I read on the apple support discussions that you could use 2GB?

Cheers.

 

[spinne1]

The B & W's top out at 1 GB of ram, not 1.5 (4 x 256 mb). And they also have the limit of 128 GB hard drives, unless you drive them with a 133 PCI IDE controller card that overrides this limitation (I believe virtually all of them do). You can also use a bigger drive with a software solution that is NOT recommended on the B & W because you must use the slower IDE bus to make it work (the motherboard has a 33Mhz bus and one half that speed, if I remember correctly). More info about the software to bypass the barrier:

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

The nice thing about a B & W is that you can put four hard drives in the thing with no fuss. One goes where the zip drive is/was. The other three along the bottom. You can hook the one by the DVD drive up to the same bus as the DVD drive and make it a slave and the DVD drive the master. Then you can hook up two to either an internal bus (master/slave) or a 133 card (two masters I think), and then the last one to a slave on the 133 card. Note that you don't have to have a 133 card. You can use a 66 Mhz card and simply stick with the 120 GB size. The 66 Mhz card will be very cheap on ebay (Acard is a good one).

Even if you only get a 66 Mhz card, you still can put 4 x 120 GB in the B & W. Do you really need more than 480 GB in a Blue and White anyway? 120 GB drives can be had new on ebay for between $50-$80.

Good luck.

EDIT: I just noticed that you are in Australia, which may make all my $$ estimates moot. It may be much more difficult and expensive to get the above mentioned parts there.