I recently picked up an old all-in-one from a univeristy surplus sale. Thought the kids could use it for something. Well... I find that its hard drive is rather puny by any standard, so I'm wondering if its possible to buy a new IDE drive and just drop it in the thing. The thing didn't come with any OS disks so I can't remove the drive thats in it now. Does anyone know if this model is setup where one can simply stick another hard drive in and plug it into the mother board?
Thanks
any issues with adding another hard drive to a G3 all-in-one?
July 30, 2007 - 11:12am
#1
any issues with adding another hard drive to a G3 all-in-one?
the max you can add is 128gb, and I believe you can add in any ATA hard drive. The bus is very slow, so even if you have a 7200RPM HD, and it's ATA100/133, it will only run at 16mbps. You can supplament this by adding in a ATA/100/133 PCI card, and you will get the full speed of the hard drive. You will need one that is not only mac compatible, but bootable if you plan to use the new HD as your primary drive.
BTW, in most cases, if you add in a ATA PCI card, there is no 128gb limit, so you can drop in as large a hard drive as you can afford.
I hope that helps.
-digital
Make sure you have a Rev. b or Rev. C Rom. otherwise it doesn't support slave drives
If you find you can't add another drive, head on over to eBay and get a Revision B or Higher (C Preferably)
Well, to be precise, you can drop in as large a drive as you like, but it will only read the first 128GB. I got a good deal on a 160GB Seagate, so I used that. What's a few stray GB between friends?
well, let me reword that "the maximum the internal bus can address is 128gb."
For my B&W G3, I actually got a good deal on a seagate 120gb HD, but it formats down to 111gb!! I wonder what the formatted capacity of a 160gb disk is? And I have never seen a 128gbb hard disk. And why can't manufactuers list the formatted capacity for each OS, or sell them as formatted capacitys?
and those are my rants for the day.
-digital
it's done by 2^x Power. Just like ram. You don't get a 160MB stick. Hard drives are a bit different. The platters store bytes in a 1000 base address. Hard drive manufacturers use the 1000 because it makes the hard drives look bigger to the end users. When in fact, they are semi-lying to you. They base it on the 1000 base, not the industry standard of 1024 (or 1048, differing on how you see it) Kinda like the 32GB addressing that the mid-earlier versions of DOS had. tbh, the machine can only address 128GB because of RAM locations.
Anyways said aside, it can only address 128 on the 2^x base, or 1024 base.
Apple used to use the formatted capacity as the hard drive size. that was till they caved into the rest of the industry and started to semi-lie with the rest of the vendors to avoid confusion
"120 GB" hard drive = 120,000,000,000 bytes / 2^30 bytes in a gigabyte = 111.76 GB
"160 GB" hard drive = 160,000,000,000 bytes / 2^30 bytes in a gigabyte = 149.01 GB
and as long as we're on the subject:
"250 GB" hard drive = 250,000,000,000 bytes / 2^30 bytes in a gigabyte = 232.83 GB
"400 GB" hard drive = 400,000,000,000 bytes / 2^30 bytes in a gigabyte = 372.53 GB
"750 GB" hard drive = 750,000,000,000 bytes / 2^30 bytes in a gigabyte = 698.49 GB
"1 TB" hard drive = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes / 2^30 bytes in a gigabyte = 931.32 GB
These numbers should be consistent across all platforms, whether Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux. Again, it has to do with the computer manufactures counting kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes in factors of 1024 (= 2^10), while drive manufactures count in factors of 1000 (= 10^3). Those 24 bytes do start to make a difference, don't they?
I've wondered, since the days of the "40 MB" hard drive, exactly how the hard drive manufacturers are able to get away with redefining the sizes of kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes.
I'd expect my gallon of milk or pound of cheese to be the same whether I bought it in Iowa, California, Michigan, Florida or New Jersey. And there are state and federal agencies that are there to ascertain consistent measurements used in trade.
100 km is the same distance in Canada, Argentina, England, Russia, Nigeria or Uzbekistan (and even in the US if we ever manage to get in line with the rest of the planet). If measurements are not standardized, they're meaningless.
is to not spend any money on it. When you're done spending money on it you'll be sitting there, looking at new computers, doing the math, thinking about how much newer a machine you could have bought if you hadn't spent X dollars upgrading your machine in order to just be slow. It's never going to be a fast machine, that's just the reality of it. If you really want to help yourself, buy a networked drive and throw it on your lan in your house. NAS is the way to go for adding capacity, functionality, and it's you'll be able to upgrade your NAS so you won't be screwed later on.
Also, I hope this isn't your first mac, as it will likely sour you to the experience.
Also, one can cheaply repurpose an old PC with a big drive as a NAS with something like FreeNAS. Network storage is great because all you need is space for your OS and apps on any particular machine, and all your files and media can live on the NAS.
Of course having a backup of your NAS is a great idea...