On Friday, August 8, 2003, at 09:55 PM, Stephen Hammond wrote:
A couple of other things I've seen in my research seem to indicate that getting over 137 GB makes a big difference for some reason. What's the reason?
Controllers prior to ATA-133 (ATA-100 or previous) do not support drives of a capacity larger than 137GB. It is simply a design limitation inherited from the original ATA IDE standards. New bus standards, such as ATA 133 and SATA 150 support much larger drives, but to my knowledge non are available for iMacs as and internal fitment.
Would the Maxtor work with the native controller, or should I just stick to the Seagate and be happy with 120 GB (better than 20)?
That I do not know. It will likely work but you will only be able to access the first 137GB of the disk. I'd throw the Seagate in. I am a big fan of their drives, I've never had one fail on me yet and some of my Seagate drives have been soldiering on for over 8 years :) Add to that that I have a U5 (which is 3 years old and at times of year when its below 22C (high 70s F) it runs 24/7 as a server wit hthe hard disk on power-off after 20 mins) in my G3/400, a Barracuda in my PC (SATA 80GB) and a U-Series in my G4 iMac and both are extremely quiet, and the Barracudas are VERY fast.
Controllers that fit the iMac seem hard or impossible to find without going with a new processor, too, but I know I could be wrong about that. Yet if the Maxtor would need a new controller I'd probably just go with the Seagate anyway.
Yes, I would fit the Seagate. The cheaper U-Series drives have a bad reputation for failure in high stress situations (mostly because they are not intended for high-stress situations and are installed by companies trying to cut corners) but Barracudas are reliable, fast and quiet. The only thing some people find is they get hot, but in a computer powered by a cPU that barely gets hot enough to make your finger jump, and with only 1 hard disk, this might not be such a problem.
Secondly, is putting the new drive in a Firewire enclosure (temporarily to transfer), then removing it and putting it in the iMac, a safe way to transfer my data? Enclosures cost more than I would have guessed, but maybe it's worth it.
Yes, most definitely. You are best advised to install your OS on the new disk a-fresh and then copy all your prefs and files across. If you are installing OS X this will be slightly more complex but it's nothing serious.
-- Mark Benson
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