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System Drive Upgrade - What drive is best?

revenuee

revenuee

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Sep 13, 2003
2,251
3
I Have a Sawtooth Tower

The G4 400 to be exact

I'm looking to add a second hard drive to act as my start up disk since the current start up disk is only 10 gigs and it is slowly filling up as i add more and more applications with libraries.

I was wondering if anyone can recommend a similar drive but in the 20 - 40 gig range ...

i wouldn't mind a 7200 rpm for a little faster write/read speeds since i think the current drive is 5400 rpm

the model of the drive i'm using is QUANTUM FIREBALLP LM10

i've been trying to find a few drives on my own ... but i don't want to get a drive that has to much over kill, and is going to slow down to the speed of my computer anyway.

Any recommendations would be great

thanks - rev
 
I've had 2 of the hitachi deskstar drives so far and they've both worked excellent. As for HD's you really can't go overkill on speed so much as the HD is significantly slower than your RAM, so a machine can always take advantage of a faster drive. Allthough you can go overkill on capacity, I've not came close to filling either of those deskstars as they're both 120Gb models, but you also have to take into consideration as a drive fills up it does become slower, so having a lil extra does help.
 
Originally posted by ltgator333
I've had 2 of the hitachi deskstar drives so far and they've both worked excellent. As for HD's you really can't go overkill on speed so much as the HD is significantly slower than your RAM, so a machine can always take advantage of a faster drive. Allthough you can go overkill on capacity, I've not came close to filling either of those deskstars as they're both 120Gb models, but you also have to take into consideration as a drive fills up it does become slower, so having a lil extra does help.
Click to expand...

thats the thing

i have a 18 gig SCSI drive that i use for Video Capture and i have a 80 GIG External Firewire Drive that i use for mass storage, ie if i'm working on a video and i have 3 hours of Raw footage to store

but for the system drive the 10 gig is just not enough ... a 20 gig would probably do the trick, a 30 is probably more then i need .. a 40 thats a lot considering all the storage i have ... but who knows currently i have about 15 gigs of work files (photoshop, digital camera,) stored on my Firewire drive, guess i could just move that to the 40 ...

how about a 20 gig, is it even possible to get one?
 
my local comp store carries 40Gb drives as the small side but you might check around to like macresq.com to see if they have something
 
The reason i say 20 is just because i don't want to put to much money into this computer as i am waiting for Powerbook G5 ... i realize i might be waiting a wile ... but i'm content with the system i have right now, other then the small start up disk ... i won't be selling this system i'm going to keep it around ...

i'de like to spend less then 60 before taxes

but no more then 100$ CDN post taxes

so no more then 86$ before taxes so i guess no more then 65 american ...

Don't get me wrong, i don't want the cheapest drive ... i'm concerned about quality thats why i was thinking of a smaller drive ... but based on those websites i'm well in my price range ...
 
OR- what would you think about getting a bigger drive and partitioning it out like first 20 gigs for your system and use the last 20 or 40 gigs for something else, maybe backups for your video work or, not sure if you can pull this off but a striped RAID with the SCSI disk you have and the last partition of that drive via the disk utility in OS X..
just a thought
 
probably too late

If you have not bought a drive yet, circut city has the western digital caviar 7200 drive 120GB w 8MB cache, it runs faster than your ATA runs, so its not going to slow anything down, and it only costs 69 bucks US after a 50$ rebate, why not go for more room? if you get into MP3s, digital photography or vid the extra room will come in handy. A good place to look for anything related to Macs and Mac upgrades as far as hardware is DealMac.com, also for software try Macupdate.com
 
Firstmate said:
If you have not bought a drive yet, circut city has the western digital caviar 7200 drive 120GB w 8MB cache, it runs faster than your ATA runs, so its not going to slow anything down, and it only costs 69 bucks US after a 50$ rebate, why not go for more room? if you get into MP3s, digital photography or vid the extra room will come in handy. A good place to look for anything related to Macs and Mac upgrades as far as hardware is DealMac.com, also for software try Macupdate.com
Click to expand...


I bought a 40 gig drive almost 4 months ago actually .. serves me wel

i think i might completely replace my 10 gig and get that 120 gig, i don't know ... i'm i have a major credit card bill this month, so i have to worry about that for now ... LOL


as far as "getting" into mp3's digital photo or vid ... i'm already there ... but i keep all that kinda stuff on my SCSI drives and my external firewire drives, away from my system files
 
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