Hi

I'm not a Mac user, but I do a lot of drives swapping within my PC system; if you don't have a SCSI controller on your G4 you'll need to get one to use SCSI drives; IMO for a 001 setup (since I have one too) a SCSI setup isn't necessary, for the speeds that ATA 100 or 133 have reached now you'll be more than set with a 7200 (or 10000) rpm drive; for this purpose I had great results with Maxtor drives: fast, reliable, great performance for audio applications, never had one let me down (as was the case with Seagate), but lots of users on the DUC (Digidesign User Conference) use IBM and have positive results; get a big one (60/80 Gb at least) for your audio drive, as the prices dramatically falled down on those.

Firewire drives add the ease of use of plug and play and portability, but are costlier, not to mention that some benchmark tests revealed that the ATA protocol is still a bit faster than Firewire (Maybe Opus can chime in on this); if you want to get a Firewire drive the port on your Mac should be OK, and I would go for a Lacie drive: I once worked with a G4/001/Lacie 80Gb drive combination and it was rock solid.

Hope this helps

Well, I found someone locally who has a Maxtor 120Gig 8Mb Cache drive and can install it today, which is perfect. We start the new session tomorrow, so it all works out.

The extra cost of SCSI is not nessasary with the Digi 001, another internal 7200 rpm IDE drive, or 7200rpm Firewire drive will easily give you the max of 32 24bit tracks. :cool:

Originally posted by Pootkao:
Hey! Its time to expand beyond the factory ATA hard drive that came with my G4. I'm not experienced with purchasing cpu hardware, so some recommendations and clarification would be greatly appreciated.

If I buy a SCSI drive, do I need to get additional connecting hardware or is my G4 ready to have it plunked down and plugged in?

Are there different types of Firewire connectors, or just whats on the back of my G4?

Maxtor, Seagate (esp Cheetah) and IBM all get talked up a fair amount, with another thread here giving props to Maxtor. What are the pros and cons of various brands?

ATA vs Firewire vs SCSI?

And ultimately, what drives do you recommend for use with ProTools 001 LE.

You can insert and plug in a second HD in the G4 tower. It's not SCSI.