Which drive to go for.

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Alan Wallace
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Joined: May 2 1999

I am running a 1998 mac G3 with an external 9 gig Lacie scussi dive and want to increase my hard drive space. Can anyone suggest the most economical way to add appx 20 gig external bearing in mind it must be mac compatible. Advice as to how to connect ect would be apprteciated
regards
alan

bcrabtree
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Joined: Mar 7 1999

An ultra ATA drive, such as the IBM 25GB should do just fine, and other, smaller drives, would be almost as good.

There is usually no problem connecting if your boot drive is already SCSI.

However, if it is IDE (which your CD will be as well) then it might be the case that you've no other spare IDE connectors - I'm not sure whether the 1998 Mac have two IDE channels (each with two connectors) or just one IDE channel (again with two connectors).

The other possible fly in the ointment is what O/S you are running. Mac OS 8.5.1 has good tools to let you set up these big new IDE drives, but I'm not sure about earlier Mac OS versions.

Do two things. 1/ Read the manual - usually, but not always, there is info there that will let you know the situation without opening the case 2/ Open the case, anyway and check for yourself.

Dive back here to relate any problems or ask further queries.

If you buy from a non-Mac supplier, the price will be cheaper. Also there is at least one company, Simply Computers, which offers a 14-day, no quibble guarantee.
You can purchase over the net, with free three-day delivery, from http://www.simply.co.uk

Oh, one thing to know. When there are two drives on an IDE channel, one has to have its jumper set for it to be the master, and the other has to have them set to be the slave. In this situation, ensure that the Master is at the far end of the cable from where it plugs into the motherboard (with the slave in the middle).

Shout again here if you need to.

Bob C