You can install a separate hard drive inside the G5 (up to 250 GB)- this is just what the doctor ordered- I've seen maxtors 7800 rpm 250 GB hard drives for as low as $135- (Costco) How can you go wrong with that!

In my dual G4 I have space for a total of 4 hard drives and believe me, I have them all!
I also have 2 more drives in a mini firewire tower for extrac back up. We've come a long ways since the early days! My first mac, a classic II, (circa 1992) had 8 MB ram and 40 MB hard drive...
Needless to say there was no digital audio, just midi in thoses days ( and 4 MB of ram cost a couple of hundred bucs!) We sure are lucky and spoiled nowdays...

Thanks Xavier.

It sounds like external is the way to go. I thought that Apple offering the dual ATA drive capability might be cleaner. This is the quote from the Apple site.

"The Power Mac G5 can hold two internal Serial ATA drives that support 1.5Gbps throughput per channel (equivalent to a 150 MBps data rate). Designed to meet the demands of digital video editing, 3D modeling and other data-intensive applications, Serial ATA is the next-generation industry-standard storage interface that replaces the typical (a.k.a. Parallel) ATA interface. Since each Serial ATA drive is on an independent bus, there’s no competition for bandwidth as with Parallel ATA."

Appreciate your input.

I have had no issues whatsoever with the four drives I have in my G4. I have the 80 Gb that came with the mac, plus 2 120 GB drive and a 160 GB drive, all maxtor, save the original drive for the mac which I think its a seagate- ?

Xavier is definitely giving you great advice. Buy your MAC with (1) HDD and add another on your own when you recieve it and you will save money. You didn't mention which Power Mac you are considering but either the 80GB or 160GB drives will be sufficient as your main drive. Add a 250GB SATA secondary drive to store your music and you'll be in great shape. I would also suggest getting your MAC with the standard RAM amount and adding any more on your own. The reason for this is Apple and all of the PC makers charge an arm and a leg to add extra RAM and HDD's. You can buy the exact same parts for 1/2 of what they will charge you to put it in at the factory. RAM and HDD's are very easy to install (seconds for the RAM and minutes for the HDD's) and you'll learn something along the way.

Good Luck

Check out :
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/G5Jam.html

You can install 4 additional drives into your g5.

maintiger wrote: My first mac, a classic II, (circa 1992) had 8 MB ram and 40 MB hard drive...

xavier i had a mac plus with no hard drive... eheheheh
how i loved that computer!
i'd like to have it now! it would work as a piece of art!

as for the hard drives! the more the better!
i've bought now a maxtor 300g with 2 firewire port and one usb port for 349 euros!
i think it's better to have them this way! i connect it directly on the motu!

This is an older topic, but it's a good one. So...

As a Mac consultant and long time video/audio guy I can say don't sweat it. The best thing to do is to partition the drive your OS will be on. This way you can scan the OS from time to time for errors and not have to scan the whole drive. Also, OS X uses swap files and these will find free space better if you have a good size partition for the OS with at least 6 GB of free space at all times. The SATA drives in the G5s are sooooo fast, over kill for audio unless you run 64 tracks. The fastest PATA drives are 7200RPM (plenty fast), which is the standard speed for SATA. The fastest SATA drives are 10k RPM but top off around 72GB or so and are heat misers. Use the second drive as a backup drive since drive failure is the most common cause of data loss. You can backup to a FireWire drive too but the internal is much faster; though the FireWire drive can be put in a hard shell case and carried off-site for optimal protection (like mine).

Hi, I just bought a MAC G5....what is the best internal hard drive to use as my dedicated audio drive? For the purposes of speed and high track counts with multiple edits and plugins is an internal hard drive prefrable to an external drive? Also, should I still partition my existing internal hard drive that came with the G5 even if I get a dedicated interanl audio drive?

My head is swimming....

Verveling wrote: Hi, I just bought a MAC G5....what is the best internal hard drive to use as my dedicated audio drive? For the purposes of speed and high track counts with multiple edits and plugins is an internal hard drive prefrable to an external drive? Also, should I still partition my existing internal hard drive that came with the G5 even if I get a dedicated interanl audio drive?

My head is swimming....

Congrats on the new G5!

Choosing brands these days is pretty much a duck shoot. I have always been fond of Seagate which now offers a 5 year warranty. Video guys tout the Hitachi drives which have a good record too. 7200 RPM drives are just fine and plenty fast. The 10K RPM drives are limited to smaller capacities and are hot plates!

Here's the set up I would recommend for you:

Use a larger capacity drive as the OS/backup drive and a slightly smaller capacity drive as the "work" drive. Partition your OS drive into two parts, one for the OS and one for the backup. OS drives are usually about 30GB unless you need space for lots of Garage Band Jam packs or other application components that have to be installed on the the OS drive. The second drive should be one partition which is equal to or smaller than the backup drive. Ideally a backup drive is about 3/1 in size but a drive of at least equal size will do since you probably won't fill up the work drive right away.

Every week or so, depending on how full your backup gets, you will need to reset the backup. This is a short term backup, the benefit is that it will back up very fast. Anything older than a few weeks or months is an archive and should be done to optical storage. Otherwise go for an external drive, but it will not be as fast as the internal disk and not as safe for archiving as optical storage. Use Retrospect to backup.

As for plug-ins, that really depends on the processor's ability. Generally the more tracks/voices you use, the more RAM you will need. You should have 2-3GB of RAM installed. Most programs will not use more than two at this point with OS 10.3 but the apps will use 2 and then the OS will use about 256 or so. The OS will use about 5GB of disc space for swap files though so make sure your OS partition has about 5-10GB free at all times. Otherwise your system will begin to slow down.

These are best-case goals of course.

Enjoy!