Mac guys, learn me on hard drives.
 

Hey guys,

My friend is buying a G4 tower (keyboard, moue, monitor, tower) for $60 with a bad hard drive. As near as I can remember, they used SCSI drives, correct? Now, my question is, will it boot with any old SCSI drive, or does it have to have Apple firmware? Reason I ask is that most SUN machines won't boot without SUN firmware, and I don't want to have her plunk down $$$ for a SCSI drive and it won't boot.

TIA,

~Slow

I think all of those machines ran an ATA/IDE 5.25" HD

You can use "Drive Setup" from Apple to format the HD - it's free and can be found at versiontracker.com

edit: Drive Setup is for pre OSX systems! I'm not sure how to format a OS X drive as I've never done it, but I'll dig around.

This should help for X: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html

I hope this helps!

Best,

Kurt

All G series macs (G3 and up) use regular IDE drives... and standard PC ram too, so if you have some PC133 ram laying around, max it out for him.

Boot to the install CD and off you go...

+1 on id10t

The install disc should have a utility program to format the drive for you or just let the installer do it for you :D

$60 is a steal!!!
Get a nice fast 250gig HD :D
Max the ram

If it is about 800mhz then you should be able to run OSX 10.4.
earlier models I don't remember anymore but it should be able to handle at least OSX 10.3

OS9 is just plain ... trouble and getting hard to find software.

They all use IDE. Some may have SCSI on board as well, you can ignore it.

Boot from intsall CD.

Defaults to wanting to do an install but you can go to the menu and launch Disk Utility if you want to do custom partitioning on the drive.

You could add a SATA board and add two SATA drives inside if you want to.

hmm, but wouldn't the MB be a bit slowfor data transfer ???

If you set it in the corner for a while it will regenerate on its own:)

Gettin' wood yet Len?

I was thinking about adding SATA, especially since she is going to use it for Final Cut Pro 2 and Pro Tools, but I don't know yet what her budget is. Broke college students, you recall:)

Thanks for the help guys.

Go for the largest HD you can get. The difference in cost between a 250 and 300+ Gb drive is almost nil. I recommend Seagate drives. A 320 Gb HD is currently about $75.00.

If she's editing video, maybe more storage is needed. Get add'l RAM too.

Sherwood

STOP, unless she is just using it to learn then I would not use that box for Final Cut. She may be disappointed in the performance.

Video editing on any platform or OS gobbles tremendous amounts of processor cycles and for anything serious you would want an external RAID with hardware controller.

As far as Pro Tools. Box is fine but have fun setting that one up. Thing about pro tools is it can be a ***** to get running and once it is you don't mess with the box, IE no system updates or anything else. Pro Tools can be very finicky.

Thank you! I knew I could find Mac wisdom here:)

It will be used for college coursework involving Final Cut and Pro Tools; how demanding that is, I don't know. She indicated that her school uses G4's for it (in the labs). I suppose there is always the possibility that they are G5s and she doesn't know it:-P

I don't do much (read: anything) with video editing, but my friends that do, say what you said, it takes tremendous resources. Whether the CPU in that box is up for it, I don't know. But, my step-brother works for CDW, so I could build a SATA (or SCSI) RAID setup for her rather cheaply. Depending on her budget I might just go this route.

Thanks for the Pro Tools advice, I'll keep that in mind and let her know not to fsck with it. Do you have any tips regarding setup that I might find useful?

Thanks.