help w/New Hard Drive

[Dr. No]

I am upgrading a friend's blue and white (with Sonnet 500 G4) with a new HD. (I believe the Mac is a rev. B model, it has brackets to put a hard dirve on top of the main one.) The onboard controller is only ATA/33.

The new drive is a 40 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 8 Plus. It is Ultra ATA/133. In the user's manual, it states that "On computers older than Power Mac G4, you are recommended to use an ATA PCI card instead of the onboard ATA."

Does this mean I NEED a new ATA card?? Will using the onboard one give me porblems (like kernel panics/data corrupotion)?? Or does it just make the drive faster?...

Thanks.

 

[Celeron]

The drive will work on the onboard controller just fine, it just won't operate as fast as it would otherwise. In this case the drive is going to be bottlenecked by the controller, instead of the controller being bottlenecked by the drive which is how it usually is.

 

[Mord]

i'd get one of these: http://www.xlr8.com/Apple_Mac_Products/XLR8_Macintosh_Products/Mac_CPU_G4_Upgrade_ZIF_PS.html

it's the same price as the sonnet and 100MHz faster (and it says it's been tested stable at 650MHz).

xlr8 is gr8.

remember you have to buy a cable to run the drives in master and slave settings and if you were to buy a controller it would make sense to get a sata one with a sata drive.

 

[cluthz]

No problems at all!
I have a beige G3/266 and have Maxtor 30GB ata100 disk in it, and it works great!
(well the beige can't handle more than 16 mb/sec over the ata bs and the disk can brobably push about 30 mb/sec)
The DimondMax9 can probably push 30-40 mb/sec, but the ATA33 bus on the B&W would limit it to 33mb/sec.
It will make a great speed increase anyway compared to the old HD these machines shipped with.