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What do i need to add a 3rd and 4th hard drive
- Thread starter Se7en The Great
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You could invest in an ATA or SATA PCI card and put some larger/faster drives in there. That's what I did on my QS '01.
yellow said:
Agreed. For awhile I had a third hard drive below the DVD burner, on the secondary ATA controller. It was noticeably slower than the other drives because the secondary controller (meant for slow optical drives, not fast hard drives) is slower itself.
Then I was going to add another drive to my FreeBSD PC but I ordered a SATA drive by mistake. So I thought, what the heck - I bought a SATA card for the Mac and put the new drive in there, down at the bottom where there was still an extra drive bay. Then I took the other drive off the secondary controller and put it in the PC. Everything works great, and much faster than having the other drive on the secondary controller.
Presumably if I want to add a 4th drive sometime, I can get another SATA drive and put it in the spot underneath the DVD drive.
It depends on what you are using it for, also some of the Quicksilvers are limited to 128gig drives, so you may need to add an IDE controller in a PCI slot.Se7en The Great said:
Also, the machine holds 3 hard drives. Maybe you should consider going with larger drives?
Se7en The Great said:
Depends on what you're using them for.. video editing, pr0n, app development, web development, graphical development? Nah, not overkill. Just to have a lot of elbow room for growing? Yes, overkill.
Depending on which Quicksilver you have (I suspect the 2001 original one), the internal ATA will not see anything larger then 128GB, so I'd stick with 2 120s on the internal ATA and put the larger ones on an ATA or SATA PCI card. Then move your boot drive to one of those.
Edit: if you have a QS '02 or later, then the internal ATA is "supposed" to support the larger drives. Officially, Apple says the ROM barrier was fixed in MDDs, but xlr8yourmac.com notes that QS models post 2001-model also supported the 128GB+ drives.
thx guys
more questions:can i replace the original PCI? now that i organized a lil. i found out a had alotta dupz so now i got more space but i do alotta graphics so it will fill up again pretty fast. i'm thinking of doing two 200 or 300gb drives and a processor upgrade. what the best upgrade for a QS Dual 1ghz? it running kinda slow!
more questions:can i replace the original PCI? now that i organized a lil. i found out a had alotta dupz so now i got more space but i do alotta graphics so it will fill up again pretty fast. i'm thinking of doing two 200 or 300gb drives and a processor upgrade. what the best upgrade for a QS Dual 1ghz? it running kinda slow!
Nothing's overkill if you want it...
I've got a 2-channel SATA card in my Digtal Audio with a single 250GB Hitachi drive on it, and my original 40GB connected to the ATA bus. If you want to get crazy buy as many drives as will fit in the tower (3), and then expand outside with a SATA external RAID array. Buy a WD Raptor and make it you boot volume.
Sonnet makes a multiple channel internal/external SATA card with hardware RAID, I believe. There's really a huge number of combinations limited only by the size of your wallet.
I've got a 2-channel SATA card in my Digtal Audio with a single 250GB Hitachi drive on it, and my original 40GB connected to the ATA bus. If you want to get crazy buy as many drives as will fit in the tower (3), and then expand outside with a SATA external RAID array. Buy a WD Raptor and make it you boot volume.
Sonnet makes a multiple channel internal/external SATA card with hardware RAID, I believe. There's really a huge number of combinations limited only by the size of your wallet.
Lord Blackadder said:
I read that the rmp difference in the raptors indeed make them faster then 'normal' 7200rmps... but they both only have 8MB buffers... so somewhere (can't remember now) I've read that if you would get any 7200rpm drive with 16MB buffer... the data would go as fast as on the raptors... and you get them upto 300GB instead of 36/74GB in the raptors... and the prices are likely similar or even cheaper for more storage
allso setting up a mirrored raid for the bootvolume would increase read speeds (write remains the same off course but if you want both read & write to speedup stripe them (but if one fails you're ****ed))
Jo-Kun said:
I've heard similar things but I don't own either drive so I'm just repeating what I've heard...are there HDDs with 16mb buffers? (too busy "working" to look now
)Either way, a Raptor will speed things up - they're just not a "deal".
Lord Blackadder said:
yes there are SATA HDDs with 16mb buffer (upto 300GB allready)
maxtor: 250 & 300GB with 16mb