----------  Original message  ----------
Subject: Double HDD stacking in G3 and G4
Date:    Montag 11 Januar 2010N
From:    "Michael G.M." <[email protected]>
To:      "G-Group" <[email protected]>

> Needing some suggestions or options for stacking HDDs in G3 and G4
> PowerMacs that didn't come with the double-stack sleds. If there's any
> other ways or options for this other than the sleds (which I'll get
> from ebay's otherwise) I'd really, really like to know.

I would either buy a sled on eBay _or_ -- if you don't move the Mac around 
(which you really don't do often, do you? -- just have them laying on the 
inside floor of the PowerMac case. Just place one on top of the other.

If you're really worried you can connect them using a wire and a screw, so 
static discharge is now possible. /I didn't do that.../

I had two disks running inside my Power Mac G4 AGP Graphics, which I also got 
without a sled, for selveral months without any problems.

> I've googled
> and oogled many a time and wondered what could I use for SATA and ATA
> drives internally in G3 and G4 Macs. :P

You have the two options: 1) buying ATA drives limits you to 500 GB per drive, 
because there are no bigger capacities available for parallel ATA (and 
probably will never be).
2) Buy a SATA drive of your choice and use an adapter. You can use any ATA-to-
SATA adapter that you can find (or was it SATA-to-ATA?) They are the same for 
PCs and Macs, because they are working at the hardware level. You you connect 
the SATA drive to the adapter, and the IDE cable along with the power cable to 
the adapter. Done. Now the SATA drive looks like an ATA drive (at hardware 
level!) to the computer, as if it actually *were* an ATA drive.

For both options, you can use just any available size for ATA drives, but you 
will have to enable LBA-48 access -- which the controller chip of almost all 
G4s can do, but which was not enabled by the Open Firmware.

Use this script and you should be done: 
http://4thcode.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-128-gib-or-larger-ata-hard-
drives.html

*Really* the only setback: you will have to make sure that Mac OS X is inside 
the first 128 (137) GB. So you will want to have a separate partition for that 
(e.g. 100 GB to be safe), just in case you ever have to reset your PRAM or if 
you PRAM battery brakes.


I hope that helped,
Andreas  aka  Mac User #330250
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