[Donnie]

I'm going to be installing a second HD in the next month and wanted to get an idea of what the Mac people thinks works best with the powermac G4's. Im going to be staying around or under $100. I would like to stay around an 80 gig. That size just seems rite for me, and my original drive is an 80. At this point I am leaning toward a Maxtor, but have heard some good things about Wester Digital. I also have been looking at samsung drives.

[yikes650]

I've heard good/bad things about every single brand, but in my own experience Western Digital has been great. I now have two in my G4 and they're very fast and nearly silent. The only Maxtor I've owned, by contrast, was loud (I could hear it over the power supply) and starting making horrible clicking noises after 1 month of use. It only got worse from there, and in 4 months it was completely dead. I'm sticking with Western Digital.

[doggdamac]

My B&W came with a Maxtor in 1999 and it's still running just fine. I have added 3 more over the years and never had any problems or excess noise from any of them.
But I think you will find just as many preferences & opinions as there are HD makers /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
If I had the need to add HD's right now to a reasonably current machine, I would go for a 10k WD Raptor SATA drive (& controller card)....... granted it is more than $100, but way faster too /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[MacCheetah3]

Hi
Originally posted by doggdamac

In reply to:

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But I think you will find just as many preferences & opinions as there are HD makers /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

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Precisely. I personally choose Seagate as my first choice.
Originally posted by doggdamac

In reply to:

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If I had the need to add HD's right now to a reasonably current machine, I would go for a 10k WD Raptor SATA drive (& controller card)....... granted it is more than $100, but way faster too

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Now that I can't completely agree. It only pays to spend money on such a setup if you really need the speed and if your Mac has at least a 133MHz system bus, 167MHz Power Mac G4s would be a better suit. PATA drives are plenty fast for the average user but SATA is very nice and still could be taken advantage of with a fast enough machine. Not that you won't see a speed boost on any G4 with that but it will be so minimal on a machine with a 100MHz bus or lower and it'd be a waste.
MacCheetah3
Apple PowerBook G4 Titanium 1GHz, 1GB, 60GB, SuperDrive, Airport, Mac OS X, 20GB iPod (4G)
Debug Computer Services http://www.click2debug.com

[Donnie]

Thank you all for the input.

[aliasfox]

If you look online, you can find 160 gig 7200 RPM 8 meg cache drives for about $60- from either Maxtor or Western Digital. Seagate drives are a little bit more, but they have 5 year warranties. I spent $90 on my 200 gig Seagate drive (in an external case), and it's fast and spacious- and it was quiet when I got it. Too bad the case is louder than the hard drive now.
Don't bother with hyper-expensive drives- especially in an older computer, it would be a case of diminishing returns. Just make sure that the drive you're getting has 8 megs of cache- noticeably faster (especially with small files and program launches), and not significantly more expensive than 2 meg drives (often labeled as OEM).