Hard Drive For Quicksilver 2002

Just be aware if a power issue should affect the machine severely enough, anything inside the machine won't be protected against it. If you are using those drives as backup, they are most effective as external, not internal drives.

Most external drives are Parallel ATA and not SATA. However, depending on the age of your machine, drives over 120 GB may not be readable as a single partition over that size:

http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n86178

An internal SATA card that is new, will avoid that problem, if those drives are indeed SATA. Older drives you find inside your machine and most external drives are Parallel ATA, and may need a newer Parallel ATA card if the capacity is greater than 120 GB. Regardless, you should be able to mix drives inside the machine, as long as you observe the capacity restrictions, the master/slave jumper and cable configurations of all the drives.

Message was edited by: a brody

Hi

Yes, the PCI card will allow you to install SATA drives greater than 120GB. Note this is true regardless of whether your Quicksilver has a drive capacity limit or not, as the limit exists within the ATA controller on the logic board, which won't be used by any SATA drives connected to the SATA controller on the PCI card.

Yes, you can keep your old ATA drive, but it will remain connected to the ATA controller on the logic board, not the SATA controller on the PCI card. Basically any existing ATA drives must be connected to the onboard ATA controller, whilst any new SATA drives must be connected to the SATA controller on the PCI card.

The two external drives are probably ATA rather than SATA and have been mounted in external firewire enclosures. Note you'll only be able to have two ATA drives and two SATA drives inside the computer, not three ATA drives. This may be a problem if you already have one internal ATA drive and two external ATA drives (in firewire enclosures) . You'd have to buy an ATA PCI card rather than a SATA PCI card, or keep one of the ATA drives external.

The card will be fine for two SATA drives. The size limit only applies to drives that are connected to the built in bus. PCI cards with 48-bit LBA will support larger drives.
As for

Can I still keep my old drive as an extra that the SATA card will see?

Do you mean your ATA drive that is connected to the ATA bus in your tower?
You can just leave the drive where it is, connected as is, and install two SATA drives (connected to the controller) along with it. Your system will see all 3 drives just fine.
If you mean that you want to connect the ATA to the controller, you will need an IDE to Serial ATA converter.
Your QS supports large drives, so you could forego the cost of the controller and just put large ATA drives in. But, I am guessing that the two externals that you want to consolidate are SATA.