My G4 is running seriously low on disk space, so I have decided to invest in a Lacie 320gig external firewire drive next week. At present, I have a 20 gig internal drive that came with the computer plus another 40 gig internal disk that I bought a few months later.
Now that I am going to finally have a lot more available disk space, I’d like to wipe and re-install everything and aim for the best possible configuration. Any ideas of what would be the most effective set up for Photoshop? should I dedicate the entire 40 gig hard disk as a scratch disk or would the external firewire drive be a better option?
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I would get a couple of internal 120gig ATAs myself. you don’t say what box you have but if its a G4 you have room for 3 hard drives inside. I have a 60, 80 and 120. I just got the 120gig for $80 with rebate. its a Maxtor.
I have an old 400MHz G4 and I wasn’t aware that it could take a 3rd hard disk inside. When I looked there only seemed to be connection points for two drives unless a 3rd only requires the smaller plug.
I’ll almost certainly be getting a G5 before the end of the year and would simply like the G4 to be a useful back up machine to work on some jobs in the background, so 60 gigs of space plus access to a large external disk should be more than enough. I am looking forward to having the two machines connected via firewire for fast file transfers.
Its incredible how much hard drives have come down in price!
The G5s need SATA (as opposed to ATA) internal HDs and can take two of them. Any ATA internals which you buy for the G4 will not be usable in the G5.
An external FWD is not as fast as an internal and there is a serious risk of them being damaged if you start up or shut down the computer with them attached and mounted.
Perhaps your best plan would be to push your G5 plans forward although there is a good chance that new models will be announced in July — which would probably give you the option of either getting the latest and greatest or of buying one of the current ones at a greatly reduced price.
I think I’ll leave the G4 as it is in terms of internal drives. The external drive is has both firewire 400, 800 and USB2, so it will be good on the G4, G5 and even for my PC laptop if necessary. From what you are saying, I should just use the firewire drive for storage and rely on the internal 40 gig drive as a large scratch disk.
I am really waiting for the next generation of G5’s to be announced before deciding what to do there.
hmm, I am getting a DVD writer at the same time with the idea of backing everything up at regular intervals and then storing the DVD’s at a different location. So far this is the best solution I know of for safeguarding files. I’ve never been able to establish if there is any difference in reliability between DVD’s and CD, though I prefer the idea of CD’s in principal because if there is a problem at least the amount of data loss is more limited, however, I have so many CD’s with film scans etc that its becoming a real pain.
I’ve never heard that the 800 firewire disks were more prone to problems. Is this a common issue?
This was the famous bug that was discovered when Panther was first released that was causing people to lose all the data from their external firewire hard drives. I don’t think it is a problem with the actual hardware as such and this should have been resolved with 10.3.1.
I checked with Lacie and they assured me that there would be no problem with OS X. The disk is also hot pluggable and can be hooked up to either a PC or Mac without the need to format the drive or add specific drivers.
Actually, the bug that wrecked FireWire drives has been around since before Panther. It became widely known when Apple released OS 10.2.8 and the following day withdrew that release. Later a new 10.2.8 was released.
I have two FireWire (400) drives permanently attached to my machine, first my old Frankenmac and now a new G4, and have never had even the slightest hint of a problem. But then, I’m booting exclusively into 9.2.2. 😉
My FW400 LaCie 400GB crashed last week; crashed 10.2.8 and 4 of 5 partitions. A few weeks out of warranty.
LaCie tech bad rapped OS X, blamed OS X for the crash. Then talking to a supervisor (unsuccessfully trying to get some warranty extension) we established that one of two drives – the secondary one – in the FW400 had self destructed; the first half of the drive still works – but I will not rely on it or fill it more than half way. US$850 down the tubes.
My much older Acom FW400 drive has had no problems. Having at least one external FW drive for sneaker net is very useful. However, after my experience with the LaCie 400 I don’t think I would necessarily put a really large drive (relative to the on board data storage; a 320 would be >5 times your internal capacity) in that role.
Also I am a bit soured on LaCie right now. The crashed drive actually had less than a few hundred hours on it. [I know better. I should have aggressively tested that sucker right away.]
I suggest that you keep all partitions fairly large, except perhaps one for scratch. Especially keep the system partition(s) large, since lots of things prefer to live on the same partition as the OS. One LaCie tech suggested that less partitioning was better than more partitioning from a stability standpoint.
When the LaCie crashed I was about to wipe my main internal drive for a clean 10.3 install. One hour later lots of important data would have briefly been located only on the LaCie. A bad plan, obviously. Fortunately not implemented.
Ouch, that’s a nasty experience and I’ll bear that in mind. If nothing else it shows that with computers we are never 100% safe. With the Lacie’s I have heard a couple of people singing their praises and others who hate them. My decision to get one is largely based on having two monitors plus a CD writer that still work well and some good experience with tech support.
My plan was to keep the system plus all apps on the original 20 gig hard disk and then use the 40 gig hard disk as a scratch disk for Photoshop but possibly create a 5 gig partition for OS 9 although I literally only fire that up once every few months now.
On the Lacie, I would create a 20 gig partition and use a utility like deja vu to copy over the essential documents from the operating system and user folder at regular intervals. I thought the rest of space could be used to store work files which would mainly be tiff files, though I am not sure how many partitions I should create to be safe. In 5 years of computing I have never had a hard drive fail, but obviously it can and will happen one day so I think now would be an excellent time to get everything sorted out as reliably as possible.
Focusing on the DVD writer – I just replaced the stock Superdrive (2x Pioneer DVR-104) in my DP 1GHz Quicksilver with it’s much faster brother, the 8x DVR-107. ($135 including shipping from ZipZoomFly.) With the release of 10.3.3, the 107 is supported natively. (which means the next generation of G5s will likely have them)
Large hard drives are great but that means more and more backup space. Burning a DVD at 2x (half hour) is a pain, not to mention, finding 2x DVD-R discs is becoming difficult. I haven’t burned an 8x DVD yet as they’re just now starting to show up on the shelves but the 4x speeds are already a relief.
The reason I bought the 107 – I too just lost a hard drive. A 5 month-old internal Maxtor 160 gb. I rebooted for whatever reason and poof, got the "This drive is not recognized by OSX – Initialize?" message. Nothing I tried helped this drive, including running DiskWarrior. Fortunately, I was backed up save for a few non-essential files.
So yes – at some point you WILL have a hard drive fail. To be completely safe, it’s best to have multiple backups on different media. What DVD burner are you thinking of getting? Of course, by this time next year, dual layer (9gb) 16x DVD burners will be all the rage.
Hi Phil, I am getting a LaCie burner. Here is some of the blurb:
"This universal drive delivers four DVD formats in a single, slim device. By combining DVD+RW and DVD-RW formats, the LaCie Dual DVD±RW Drive delivers greater creative versatility by eliminating the need to choose one format over another. This combination drive is also capable of writing to CD and DVD formats, which are compatible with nearly all existing DVD-Video players.
Offering the fastest DVD record speed on the market in a slim, aluminum design, the LaCie Dual DVD Drive features 8x record speeds in DVD-R and DVD+R formats. This all-in-one rewritable drive also features FireWire and Hi-Speed USB 2.0 ports for easy connection to any Mac or PC, making it the most versatile drive available.
Record professional-quality, personalized DVDs with your LaCie Dual DVD±RW Drive and the included Roxio DVD Builder authoring software. Import video and audio footage from your DV camcorder, arrange your sequences, and burn projects onto DVD or CD-Video disks. Completed DVDs can then be played back on virtually any DVD player to share among family and friends"
As a basic objective, I’d like to have a large internal hard drive that is synced with an external drive. Finally, I’ll make DVD back ups of every job including RAW files etc and using this system I reckon I’m safe. I’ll also install a back up battery system that cuts in instantly in case of a power failiure to ensure nothing is lost that way.
When the second generation of G5’s comes out in a few months I want to totally re-organize everything from a standpoint of workflow. One thought for example is to use Quickeys or create a script to have saved images uploaded to all the stock agencies automatically via the FTP server. I like the idea of having it all automated so that the computer works in the background while I can concentrate on retouching. If it proves problematic, I suppose I could always transfer the files to the G4 via firewire and have that one do the operation in the background so that it doesn’t interfere with my main work. Productivity is the name of the game, leaving time for creative solutions and I’ve been struggling along for far too much time. My current CD writer has a 4x maximum speed so it takes 40 minutes to write and verify a 700MB CD!
The scary part is that I went out and paid around $400 at today’s exchange rate for my 4x external USB LaCie writer less than 3 and 1/2 years ago. At the time they did make some "super fast" 12x firewire writers for the same money, but they wouldn’t connect to my imac. All of this was about 2 weeks before Toast Titanium was introduced allowing us to burn in the background and I thought I would be using the imac to burn while I carried on working with the G4. Do you remember what it was like when CD’s failed in OS 9 if you did anything else at all?
My G4 doesn’t have a built in writer and I’ve always been nervous about pulling out the existing unit and putting in a writer. Is it easy to do in practice? it sure would be nice to have a fast built in CD writer as long as it can continue to read my DVD’s.
The one redeeming quality of the old LaCie burner is that its remarkably good at reading poor CD’s and I’ve often been told that the slow old readers are worth keeping purely for their ability to read CD’s when the fast new ones fail totally.
Yes, the swap is a piece of cake – should take all of 5 minutes. If you need the ability to read DVD, you’d need a combo drive. Quickly checking xlr8’s user database:
it seems that an LG brand, model 4480b (48x24x48x16), is fully supported in 10.2.8 and up. Plug your pertinent info into the database and see what you come up with. The other option is to go with a DVD burner. CD burning will be slower (the DVR-107 is 24x), but it’ll be a large leap from what you have now. You could also probably find the older, Pioneer DVR-106 drives (burns DVD-R -/+ at 4x and CDs at *I think* 16x) I’ve seen internal OEMs for $80 or so but you’d have to shop around.
Do you remember what it was like when CD’s failed in OS 9 if you did anything else at all?
Yes! And I still have the $400, 4x scsi burner to prove it! Lotsa coasters in them days.
I believe that one of the big reasons we all developed a large coaster collection is that these earlier burners or their software don’t support buffer underrun protection.
BTW, we still use a ($650) SCSI 8x CD-only burner on one old Mac — it was best in its class at the time. Aside from the buffer underrun errors, we discovered (the hard way) that we could only reliably burn 650 MB/74 minute blanks; not the newer format 700 MB/80 minute ones.
Just as a quick update, I received the hard drive yesterday and the DVD writer this morning. All I can say is wow!
I always spend ages waiting for computer equipment to significantly improve because I don’t want to update for just a small gain in performance, then after making a couple of purchases of new equipment, I understand that in the world of computers 3 years is like a century. Both items perform perfectly and its made me think about upgrading to a G5 a lot more seriously if this is typical of the sort of performance boost I can expect.
I guess my old CD writer must be worth about $2 now.
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