I'm about to buy a hard drive to augment the factory 80G hard drive in my G4 800. The idea I have in mind is to find a drive faster than the one currently in my G4 (not what one would call a difficult project) and then use the new drive to run the OS & all my apps and move my documents, pictures, mp3s, etc. to my old drive.
It seemed a pretty straightforward decision, and I originally planned on getting an internal drive as I have the room for it. I then thought an external would make more sense, as I could more easily use it with an Intel Power Mac which I plan on picking up eventually. Then I read that external FireWire drives run slower than internal drives due to the interface connection. This helpful bit of info was followed by the news that it's best to leave as much room free in the G4 towers as possible as they can get quite hot. More free room means more air flow, and thus less strain on the processor, or so I've heard.
So now I'm at a bit of a loss. I've read about cards, such as the SeriTek/1VE4, that make it possible to run an external drive faster than an internal drive (at least with the bus of a G4), but picking up one of those is an additional expense I'm not sure I really need. It sounds a bit like overkill, really. I'm just trying to increase my system's speed and add more storage space without causing my trusty G4 to potentially overheat (I'll probably do that soon enough when I upgrade the processor and add a Radeon 9800 Pro). Is there a simple solution, given my setup?
It seemed a pretty straightforward decision, and I originally planned on getting an internal drive as I have the room for it. I then thought an external would make more sense, as I could more easily use it with an Intel Power Mac which I plan on picking up eventually. Then I read that external FireWire drives run slower than internal drives due to the interface connection. This helpful bit of info was followed by the news that it's best to leave as much room free in the G4 towers as possible as they can get quite hot. More free room means more air flow, and thus less strain on the processor, or so I've heard.
So now I'm at a bit of a loss. I've read about cards, such as the SeriTek/1VE4, that make it possible to run an external drive faster than an internal drive (at least with the bus of a G4), but picking up one of those is an additional expense I'm not sure I really need. It sounds a bit like overkill, really. I'm just trying to increase my system's speed and add more storage space without causing my trusty G4 to potentially overheat (I'll probably do that soon enough when I upgrade the processor and add a Radeon 9800 Pro). Is there a simple solution, given my setup?
