Replacement drive for Sawtooth recommendations

ginopiazza49 · February 1, 2005 2:24PM

I have a PowerMac G4 500 (Sawtooth). The 27 Gig internal is getting a little small for me. I would like to replace that drive with a drive that is anywhere from 80 to 100 Gigs (I will go higher if the price is right). Also, what enclosure should I use for the 27 Gig drive to make it an external for quick backups?

dave marsh · February 1, 2005 2:44PM

Hi, I just replaced my old Sawtooth HD with a 120GB 7200 RPM Seagate drive. It works great, and is actually quieter than my old drive. I don't remember the price, but I do remember that it gave the most bang for the buck among the locally available drives, so visit your local computer store. I'd avoid going over ~125GB. I believe there is a firmware constraint on some drives over 130GB, but I don't remember the details.

ginopiazza49 · February 2, 2005 10:56AM

From what I gather from other forums, I can keep my 27 Gig internal where it is. Am I correct? I just have to change the Master / Slave jumper settings. Do you know if "changing jumper settings" the only thing I have to do? Or is the Master / Slave orientation more involved? Please let me know.

dave marsh · February 2, 2005 11:53AM

Your new drive will probably come with its jumper set to Master. Set your old drive to Slave. Or, if your don't want to remove the old drive, just set your new drive to Slave. All that matters is that they're not the same.

cubist · February 2, 2005 4:59PM

If you want it to be external, you'll need a Firewire external case. You probably know that there are brackets and cables inside the Sawtooth that will let you add a second drive in a jiffy. And you can get a 100GB 7200RPM drive for under $100.

While you might think it'd be a good idea to leave in the 27GB, you can get noticeably better performance by using Carbon Copy Cloner to move your data to the 7200RPM drive and taking the 27GB out (or making it the slave). On Xbench the improvement can be 10% - definitely worth it.

ginopiazza49 · February 3, 2005 11:18AM

If I do keep the 27 Gig drive internal too, doesn't that mean that I have to order a bracket for the drive that I am going to order (the Seagate 120)? Please let me know.

emdash · February 3, 2005 3:24PM

Quote:

If I do keep the 27 Gig drive internal too, doesn't that mean that I have to order a bracket for the drive that I am going to order (the Seagate 120)? Please let me know

Nope, your Sawtooth already has brackets and cables for two drives (and space for two or four more, if you add PCI cards to hook them up).

As Dave Marsh said, there is a 127GB limit imposed by the ATA spec.

Replacement drive for Sawtooth recommendations

Comments