mrjimmy

I'm in the market for a new drive and would like to install it myself. Are there any good sites that will walk me through the process step by step? (G4 533dual).

Also, the drive I'm interested in is a WD 120/ 8mb cache. It will be replacing the stock 40gb Maxtor. I've been reading/hearing a bit lately about ATA speeds. Can someone shed some light on this for me? Do I need a new card when I get a new drive?

Gerbill

This is about as simple as a hardware upgrade can get. Double check to make sure the new drive is set to Master (usually the default), install it in place of the present drive, boot from your System CD, format, and install your OS.

If you need to move stuff over from your old drive, here's the easy way. Change the jumper to Slave, install on top of the new drive (if you don't want to install it permanently, just lay it on top without the screws and plug in the data and power cables). Restart. The old drive will mount on the desktop - copy all your documents to the new drive. My own practice is to re-install all applications from scratch in these circumstances, but you can copy them over if you want.

All this assumes that you know about anti-static precautions - if you don't, read up on the subject first - it's the same for all computers, so there's no shortage of relevant instructions on the Web.

Cheers :-> Bill

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Kami

Check out this link from xlr8yourmac.com for an illustrated guide on adding a second drive to g4 like yours

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/add_2nd_drive/index.html

mrjimmy

Thanks Kami!

That seems to clear it up for me.

It also (I think) answers the ATA question. I'm assuming what they're saying is that all G4's from the MDD down have an ATA 66 interface. Can anyone confirm this for me?

Thanks again

yoyo

I just put the WD 120 gig drive,$79.00 BTW in my mac and it only took a few minutes. The instructions that came with the HD are excellent.

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monokitty

I don't understand why Apple never did, and still hasn't, moved to ATA/133 -- they're not any more expensive than ATA/100 drives. It took Apple long enough to move to ATA/100 from ATA/66, and by the looks of it, I would doubt they're ever going to move to ATA/133.

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Chealion

Lars - That is because they've moved to SATA, starting with the G5. That and the G4 bus speeds have been atrociously slow, so getting fast hard drives isn't high on the priority list when the system can make use of all that bandwidth.

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