Bill Taylor wrote:
Then again, I suppose I could install another IDE controller card, in one of the PCI slots that would allow me to install a second IDE drive? Does anyone know of such a card [PCI based] that a Starmax or older Mac G3 will recognize?
I don't have your original message to hand, so maybe you know that you can have two ATA/IDE devices without a PCI card - it's just that often 'Maxes have an IDE CD-ROM, so one ATA hard drive is the limit - unless you switch to a SCSI CD-ROM, as many people have. There are two on-board ATA/IDE busses, but you can only have one device on each, set to Master (no Slaves). Two 128GB drives would work fine.
I got a used Sonnet Tempo Ultra ATA66 PCI card off eBay a while back, which can take four additional ATA drives, all bootable (but there's not much room in the desktop StarMax). ATA66 is faster than the onboard StarMax busses, but is an old standard now. So the cards should be cheap.
ATA133 seems to be the current standard and you can get the cards from Other World Computing (around $80 and up):
http://eshop.macsales.com/
I don't know whether our old machines can get full benefit from ATA133 speeds, but maybe others can tell you. I can use ATA133 (and ATA100) drives with my ATA66 card - they're backwards-compatible, but the data-transfer rate is limited by the card.
Replacing the IDE CD drive with a SCSI one has the advantage that you can have two ATA hard drives without using up one of the meagre three PCI slots in the desktop 'Max. Ethernet, USB, a video card etc. quickly fill up those slots.
Good luck, Chris Adams.
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