page 3
Segment One -
Simple & Easy Performance Boosts First
July
14, 2003
Ee - I -
ee - I/O
We have a saying in IT, “you can never get paid enough, you can
never have enough RAM and you can never have a big enough . . . hard
disk drive.” There is one catch here for the early G4 Macs like
the Sawtooth, Digital Audio and Gigabit models; the BIOS will not recognize
a HDD larger than 137GB. So you have two choices, either stick with
the painfully slow standard onboard ATA-66 controller (G4 AGP, Gigabit,
Digital Audio and Silver Bullet models) and stay with maximum sized
HDD’s of 120GB, or upgrade to a ATA-100 or ATA-133 PCI controller
card that also lifts the 137GB drive barrier.
Our new favorite
“Friend of Mac” hardware supplier is SIIG
Incorporated, located in Fremont California, who just earlier this
Spring introduced their UltraATA
133/100 Pro and UltraATA
133/100 RAID PCI cards specifically for the Mac platform. Fully
compatible with Mac OS 8.x/9.x and OS X, it is the perfect solution
for also breaking the 137GB barrier. It will also coexist with the onboard
control if you want to continue using it for some reason. We found the
UltraATA 133/100 Pro online in the range of US$73.95.
If you want
RAID, very popular with the video, multimedia and audio editing crowd;
then you’ll want to go with the SIIG UltraATA 133/100 RAID PCI
card. Like it’s sister PCI card, it will also allow you to use
two HDD’s of any size, which will then be connected as RAID drives
(appear to be one large hard disk drive). We found the SIIG UltraATA
133/100 RAID PCI card online in the range of US$129.99.
You should very much consider this upgrade, as the original ATA-66 controller is a major bottleneck to performance where frequent HDD access for applications and particularly the read/writes to the swap file in OS X is occurring. If you’re building a serious video, multimedia or audio editing workstation, you must upgrade.
We installed one of
each card in our two G4 400 Sawtooth project computers and found the instructions
enclosed with each card for Mac OS 8.x/9.x and OS X to be very easy and
concise for installing the cards and adding new HDD’s.
"Come
drive with me”
In each of the two G4 Sawtooth’s we installed spicy new Maxtor
160GB 8MB Cache 7200 RPM hard disk drives and it only too about 20 minutes,
including initializing the drives with the new SIIG ATA133/100 controller
cards.
Beyond the obvious
advantages of using larger drives, you should only consider ones that
are ATA-133, 7200 RPM and have a cache of 8MB, such as found on Maxtor
and many Western Digital models. The modest investment in this high-speed
drive technology is worth every penny. We found our personal choice, Maxtor
DiamondMax
ATA-133, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache drives (the favorite of advanced gamers),
for US$98.99 after a $70 rebate at a local chain computer superstore.
The Hard Disk
Drive ranks third in the list of speed improvements to any computer. Why
third? Pretty easy to explain in this way. Your RAM is accessed continually
during all computing operations, so it is clearly number one. While you
can stuff in a mammoth 7200 RPM – 8MB or more cache ATA133 HDD into
your system, it does little good if the choke point is a slow ATA 33 or
66 HDD controller card.
Sure, if your budget is limited and you have to live with the original controller card, then do not waste your money on a ATA133 HDD; unless you’ll be upgrading the controller card later when more funds are available.
Choose your hard drive carefully, look at the specs and go for the best warranty from the manufacturer. Drives do die and Murphy’s Law states that it will be at the least opportune time. So always routinely backup your system and files (see our feature on Backup your Computer and Data, the full guide)
about us
| current articles | archive
| home | advertise!
all right reserved copyright ©1999-2003. E-mail us.
