Would you be removing the existing drives?
You can actually get quite a bit more speed out of your machine by using multiple drives. Throwing everything on one drive is kind of like trying to fit everybody's cars on one highway. But for organization, I guess having your stuff over multiple drives is not great.
Yes I'll definitely be removing the existing drives & then selling them on eBay! The whole point of what I'm trying to do is to remove the 3 existing low capacity, hot, noisy, slow drives and replace them with a single, quiet, cool running, low power, fast drive. The total capacity of the existing 3 drives added together is only 450GB, so even if I go for a 1TB drive I'll be more than doubling my capacity.
I'd much rather have the Seagate at 1.5TB though than a 1TB drive, but I'm concerned about my Mac's ability to update the firmware, the performance hit by formatting it as one partition, the lack of Journaling support, etc.
Regardless, if I do get a new internal drive, I'll get a FW800 external drive of the same size as well so I can mirror the entire disk as a back-up.
See
my post on the Apple Discussion Forums for more detail on why I want less drives in my Mac, not more. The MDD G4 tower is hot & noisy enough without having more than one drive in it, as I've found to my cost.
RAID can solve both issues.
I'm sure it can, but my Mac sits right by my bed, and it's noisy enough without huge external towers containing multiple drives, more fans etc, which I don't have the physical space for anyway.
I'd sell the whole thing & get a new 24" iMac if I could afford it. In fact I might still do that, if I decide not to get a new internal drive. That would certainly sort all the heat/noise/power/space problems, but the top spec machine with 4GB RAM & a 1TB drive is over £1600, compared to £128.50 for the Seagate we're discussing here or only £78.95 for the Samsung Spin Point F1 1TB drive, which was my original choice before I discovered the Seagate.
I just want to buy the Seagate & for it to work as flawlessly as all my other drives have up until now, but there are just so many doubts, especially given that I want it to be my boot drive, for it to be formatted in a single partition, with Journaling, and for it not to throw a wobbly and destroy any data before I've got round to buying an external drive and backing everything up.
I've got away with having no back-ups at home now for over 10 years, and I've hardly lost any data in that time. The way to achieve that is to buy reliable drives that are 100% compatible with your system & requirements, and I'd love the Seagate to fit the bill in this regard, as it's the only drive available that's bigger than 1TB, but it doesn't seem to cut the mustard for many, many people. Having said that, over a few short weeks the firmware problems seem to have been addressed. All I need now is for my other concerns to be addressed & allayed...
