Installing hard drive questions

[Brian Mastalski]

I'm installing a second hard drive in my G4/400 and I noticed although there is space for it beside the main drive the cable length only lets you install it ontop of the main drive with possible cooling problems. Is it possible to buy an extension cable to facillitate side by side mounting? [ It may have come with the drive originally and I lost it!]

Follow-up question: The drive is a Western Digital 80gig/8meg buss drive and I noticed right away that it ran much faster than when it was in a firewire box [ADS pyro-piece-o-crappola]. I mean, protools seemed to load up twice as fast, even faster than when it was on the main drive [maxtor 10gig]. I guess the firewire really was slowing it down. I'm wondering now if there would be any problem in swapping out the main drive for one of these badass WD's, maybe a 200gig. So far I'm really impressed.

One more thing, if y'all will endulge me: There were alot of opinions flying around about which drive to run protools off of, or if splitting things between 2 drives is a good way to go. I had protools and all files on a firewire drive which seemed fine before but since installing the drive internally I'm wondering if there are any definitive opinions on this issue?

Thanks in advance. i look forward to the day when I know my ass from a hole in the ground with protools and I too can help some newbie out!

[cleft]

A) I've seen ATA/IDE ribbon cable extensions, but I'd go ahead and install it on top of your original drive. I have two drives stacked in my G4/450DP and there shouldn't be any heat problems (my 2nd drive is a 80GB Seagate barracuda IV).

B) There's no problem in replacing the stock drive with a new one. Use the old drive in your Firewire case for a backup drive... I wouldn't run audio off it if it seems slow.

C) Since you'll have 2 drives, I would install ProTools on the drive with your System Folder and use the 2nd drive to record audio to. The benefit of this setup is that you have DEDICATED drive for audio. Keep your Applications (including ProTools) together on your primary system drive.

Good luck!

[Brian Mastalski]

cleft, thanks for the info. In regards to point C I probably missunderstood when Digi said have everything on a separate drive, you're saying just the audio files and nothing else on a separate drive is the important part? Right now I have protools and Os 9.2.2 and all the audio files [and nothing else ] on one drive.

[Brian Mastalski]

.... and I boot off that drive, which I also thought was important!!!

[cleft]

correct... ProTools will be on your primary boot-up drive, and the 2nd drive will be for audio "recording".

[where02190]

The G-4 is designed to have drives stacked on top of eachother.

There's little need for a large system drive, as all you want ot be putting on that is OS and applications. It would be more advantagous to have a fast audio drive, it has more to think about than the system drive.

Protools, as well as all your other applications, should be on yoru system drive. Do not install PT on your audio drive. The point of having separate application and file drives is to ease the load on the drives and CPU, one drive gives commands, the other stores the info.

Hope this is helpful.

[mig 15]

I agree with all the above. I have a 40g ibm drive installed on my G4/400 above the stock 10g quantum drive and had it running for 18 months with no problems, heat or otherwise. It has 4 partitions, dedicated to audio, with system and all apps on the quantum. Mig.

[Brian Mastalski]

That does make more sense. Can't thank you folks enough for answering my bonehead questions. I apparently have had the wrong idea about this for a while. I'm wondering what I bought the firewire box for in the first place [cooling?] if there are no problems with things set up this way.

[where02190]

The portability fo FW is very handy.
You might find this helpful: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?ar tnum=31292

Hope this is helpful.

[Muzza]

The extra mounting points for drives would be for additional SCSI drives (presumably). IDE Cables are a specified length (between 10 and 18 inches) and the connectors are to be no less than 5 inches apart and not more than 12 inches for the first connector and 6 inches for the second one.
Extra long IDE cables are NOT advisable. Apple may have better circuits for dealing with the long cable run to the CD drives in the front of the case.
A better solution, if you want more drives mounted internally, would be to have an additional ATA card; giving you an extra two to four drives.

Also, check with an apple tech as to the ATA speeds on your mac (I don't know them all). The main one on the G4/400 is 133Mbps and the secondary is 100Mbps. So it makes sense to have the Audio drive on the main bus.