Hard Drive Question...

tspencer83tspencer83
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hi,



I need to get a larger size internal hard drive for my 867Mhz Quicksilver G4 and can only find hard drives with Ultra ATA/100 and Ulitra ATA/133 connections and the like. From reading the manual, it seems that the only options available when this machine came out were with Ultra ATA/66 hard drives. So my question is, does it matter if I get a hard drive with an Ultra ATA/100 connection for example and hook it up or can my computer support any speed/type connection. Thanks

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    ATA/100 and ATA/133 drives are backward compatible with ATA/66 controllers. The only thing to worry about would be large capacity HDDs, namely drives listed as >137 GB. Your Mac will only support HDDs up to that capacity when installed internally.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,562member
    I will add to Eugene's comments by suggesting you get an external FW HD. This removes the 137GB limit. I also find it more convenient.



    I too have an 867 Quicksilver. I had installed a second HD but after a while I took it out and put it in an external FW box.



    One benefit is that the drive is now transportable. It is easy to take this to another machine in order to share files and such.



    A more important benefit is that I found that having a second HD slowed down Mac OS quite a bit. What happens is that after the second drive is unused for a while then it spins down. Now when you try to do certain Finder operations the Finder needs to check all mounted volumes before responding and you have to wait while the second drive spins up. This gets annoying after a while. You could set the drives to never spin down but then you put excessive wear on the HD.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by neutrino23

    I will add to Eugene's comments by suggesting you get an external FW HD. This removes the 137GB limit. I also find it more convenient.



    There are some enclosures that do not support >137 GB drives either, though I suppose if you buy a drive from a brand like LaCie, there would be nothing to worry about/
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