Need external hard drive for old G4

[dman61]

I have an old Power Mac G4. OS 9.2. dual 533 processors. It works great and I want to give it to my nephew to use. The problem is that the old Medea Raid I used for storage has gone bad. (I cringe to say I paid $5,000.00 for 500 gb raid back in the early days of FCP).

This is a dinosaur of a machine but as I said still works great and would be a great intro for him. I need recomendations on an external hard drive that would work with this old machine. I bought a Maxtor onetouch 4 plus 1TB. When I transfer files to this Maxtor the video stutters when playing on the quicktime player. When I try and capture on the drive an error i/o message comes up. I'm not sure but I think it's due to the old OS not being supported.

Any advice on getting the Maxtor to work or what external drive to buy that would work with old OS 9.2 would be appreciated. As stated this is a Mac G4, OS 9.2 and running the old FCP 3. The Maxtor is connected via firewire 400.

Thanks

 

[blevins321]

My guess is that it's having problems due to those USB ports only being USB 1.0. (Might be wrong here). You're really better off with a Firewire drive in that case.

 

[mstrze]

My guess is that it's having problems due to those USB ports only being USB 1.0. (Might be wrong here). You're really better off with a Firewire drive in that case.

Trouble is, the OP states in the last line:
"The Maxtor is connected via firewire 400."

I had trouble pulling in video back in the early 2000s using FCP 3 on my externals using my iMac G4 in all but the most ideal situation. Although, since you are still using the original OS, one would think it 'should' work. Maybe the Maxtor is a 'slow' drive? I had issues with drives if their platter spin speeds were too low.

As an external to just handle daily read/writes of general data, your setup is fine. To do video editing via this external is going to be tough.

How about an upgrade to a much larger internal drive?

 

[blevins321]

Trouble is, the OP states in the last line:
"The Maxtor is connected via firewire 400."

i fail

 

[cocacolakid]

My mistake, MPlayer will only play on OS X, not 9.2. Sorry.

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Before OP spends any more money, try installing the G4 optimized MPlayer, then follow Zen State's advice for setting the preferences (and set it as the default media player), as recommended in this thread.

It should fix your stutter issues and make everything play nicely together. The key feature is it can drop frames on slower machines, which is not noticeable when viewing but makes videos play smoothly. And it's free.

As for the capture problems, do you mean it's giving an error message whenever you try to write to the drive?

 

[dman61]

Thanks for all the responses.

Yes, when I try and capture video from my deck thru final cut pro, it stops the capture and gives me an i/o error message.

I spoke with someone from western digital. He recommended I buy the following drive: My Book Essential Edition 2.0 750 GB External hard drive - 480 Mbps

My Maxtor drive is run thru an older firewire 400 cable. I forgot to ask him if the "My Essentials drive" would work with this cable. On the drive spec's it looks like it uses USB 2.0. I believe my old mac uses USB 1.1.

Hope this helps explain my problem.

 

[mstrze]

You definitely need a FW drive...and make sure it's compatible with FW 400 at that. Your won't be able to use the USB with this My Essentials drive, like you said, because of the difference between USB 1.1 and 2.0. Plus even if it did work (which I don't think it would), you would be limited to USB 1.1 transfer speeds which are in no way, shape or form able to keep up with video importing.