Powerrmac G3 400 mhz - hard drive - specs /max

[djniche]

I'm wondering if anybody here can help me. I just got an old G3 400 mhz powermac. it came with 8g hard drive and I want to upgrade it. but the connection isn't IDE? is it ATA? and where can I get a 20/30 gig for a decent price.

Also what's the max memory size I can upgrade. Came with 128mb ram and has 3 more sockets available. Is 1gig max?

Also how does this machine perform with jaguar. It has mac os 9 and i'm looking to update it. Would upgrading the video card help? I think it has ATI 128 video card.

Any help would be great thanks!

 

[lmalave]

G3 400? Is that a Blue and White or a Beige? Anyway, you should be able to buy the standard EIDE/Ultra-ATA drives that all the major drive makers produce. For a 40GB I think the going rate is $80 for a 5400RPM and $100 for a 7200RPM. I have a friend that has a totally tricked out Beige G3 (EIDE 40 GB drive, EIDE DVD-ROM drive, ATI Rage 128 PCI graphics card, FireWire/USB PCI adapter card, Sonnet 500 MHz G4 ZIF CPU upgrade, 768 MB RAM). Runs OS X quite nicely, though it's still slower than my new iBook since it has a slower 66 MHz bus and can't take advantage of Quartz Extreme (no AGP, and a PCI Radeon is possible but may actually slow down graphics because of the slow 66 MHz PCI connection).

If you do find that your PowerMac G3 uses regular EIDE connections, then you can just get cheap PC drives. For EIDE devices they do not even have to be labelled "Mac compatible" or anything. I know for a fact that in the above computer the DVD-ROM is a cheapo PC unit for $60 or something, and the 40GB hard drive is a Western Digital or something that at the time was $100 and should still be about the same price....

 

[noht*]

yes it is is an IDE harddrive - and ATA, too. IIRC ATA is the implementation of IDE for HDs (ATAPI being the standard for removable storage). all IDE drives are back- and foreward-compatible (the exception is the new serial-ata standard). you'll probably have difficulties finding any 20 GB drives these days, but there are plenty of cheap bigger drives around. i personally can recommend IBM which i find to be reliable and not too expensive, but that's just an opinion. stay away from fujitsu drives though.
officially you can't put more than 1 GB in your box, but with 512MB-DIMMs it's probably possible to get more.
i'm typing this on a g3/350 with 10.1, so i guess you'll be fine with jag. just add enough ram.
upgrading the video card is possible, but makes not much sense...the radeon 7500 pci for example is not really faster than the rage 128. besides, the bottleneck (at least for gaming) is the cpu, not the video card.
hope this helps.

noht

[edit: standard. it's spelled standard. not stanard, not standarn, just standard]

 

[djniche]

It's a B/W (is that b for blue) because mine looks more greeenish .. anyway

the connection of the hard drive is weird and does not looks like the regular IDEs i've seen. That's why i was wondering what hard drive I can buy that would hook up ok to that connection.

I will upgrade the ram to about 640 or more so I can ran jaguar ok.

thanks for the help so far

 

[Choppaface]

I've got jag running on mine (it's a file server now) and it's running incredibly well. I prolly wouldn't want to use it for photo editing, but it works pretty great

 

[djniche]

Originally posted by Choppaface
I've got jag running on mine (it's a file server now) and it's running incredibly well. I prolly wouldn't want to use it for photo editing, but it works pretty great

how much ram are you using on your g3? I planning of getting two 256 mb. to make it 768mb. I wonder if this is good enough to have jaguar running smoothly.

If I wanted to upgrade my cdrom on the G3. Are there any drives that work with this tower? Can I pick up a combo drive cdrw/dvd and replace the cd rom drive?? Does anybody know any site on info on this G3?

 

[Choppaface]

I've got 384 in it I believe, and it runs pretty smooth as I said. The hard drive is also almost full...I think there's only about 500 megs left. dunno about replacement drives, but I often just hook up my firewire CD burner (a 12x LaCie) to it since it's CD-ROM is so noisy