taking my g4 for a drive

April 7, 2006 2:10 PM

I need to add a bigger hard drive to my oldish Mac G4. This kind of machine can only see 120G of storage on a drive.

The neighbourhood computer store sold me a 160G drive for pennies more than the 120G drive I wanted, because they say the 120G is no longer in stock.

The question: is the Mac going to ignore that extra 40G it can't see, or will it cause me problems?

posted by zadcat to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I have been successfully using Intech's ATA Hi-Cap Support Driver for over a year now with no problem on a 250gb drive in my 450MHz G4. I don't know that I would trust it completely as a boot drive, but I've had absolutely zero trouble using it as a secondary drive.

Before adding the drive, the g4 just ignored the extra space. I didn't seem to have any problems (other than not having full use of my spiffy new drive).
posted by notbuddha at 2:43 PM on April 7, 2006

if you don't wanna fiddle with drivers you could always get an IDE card. there are a few. I'd try out OtherWorld Computing and see what they have - personally I'd get a SATA card and trade the 160GB you bought for the equivilant or bigger in SATA, since it'll be easier to move to a new system if you upgrade (no shipping desktop Mac supports parallel ATA anymore).

if you don't get a new card or use a different driver, you will see 120GB and no more. (if you format the drive in another machine that doesn't have limit problems you may see more than 120GB, but you won't be able to use it.)

since you have the drive now though using the driver notbuddha linked to is probably easiest.
posted by mrg at 3:09 PM on April 7, 2006

The larger drive will appear and work as an ordinary 128GB drive.
posted by cillit bang at 6:13 PM on April 7, 2006

Macintosh: Using 128 GB or Larger ATA Hard Drive - from Apple.

From xlr8yourmac.com

Both excellent resources that will answer your question.
And mrg is right. I have a Sonnet ATA card (need ATA100 at least, the ATA66 card doesn't work.) and 2 x 250gb drives. It's working great.
posted by drstein at 11:46 PM on April 7, 2006

One more suggestion on this.

You could also get an inexpensive firewire enclosure for the hard drive, and hook it up to your firewire port. As long as you get a reasonably modern enclosure, it will support the 160GB with no problem.
posted by notbuddha at 6:50 AM on April 8, 2006