Should I put another HD in the G5?

What are you planning to use the G5 for?

Well, hard drive will run 30% faster but not he entire computer, you'll only see a slight increase in overall performance with a faster hard drive (and possibly only really notice the difference with a benchmark utility). It would probably be good to get a second drive and use it as a dedicated scratch disk rather than RAIDing it. But if your budget is limited I would go for more RAM first (2-3 GB is a good target).

Personally I don't think you'll notice the difference between the two drives. If you're comfortable installing hardware in your computer you can get the drive (and RAM) a lot cheaper from a third party such as OWC (http://macsales.com/) or Crucial (http://www.crucial.com/). If you're not comfortable installing hardware you may buy Apple's drive just for the peace of mind. I would get a 400 GB 7200 rpm drive.

Well, I put a 74 GB 10,000 RPM drive in my G5, mostly because I wanted an extra drive to test the 10.4 upgrade on. I already had two 120 GB 7200 RPM drives installed so I figured that if all went well I would end up with the two 120s for files and the 74 for the system and apps. I can tell you that the 10,000 RPM drive boots up way faster than the 7200. Apps launch faster too. The whole system seems much more responsive. Since I don't really do any video the 2 120s are great for file storage and backup. But, larger drives would be better for this if you have a lot of "heavy" data to store. I also moved my iTunes library to the data drive so the 74 GB drive is pretty much free to run the system and this seems to be working out very well.

DD

You can get the computer with one drive now and easily add a second drive later. After that, you have to start adding 3rd party stuff to install any more internal drives.

DD

Upgrades can be done later at a better price than Apple will charge.

For the ultimate in speed I'd go for dual RAID 0 SATA Raptors.

For graphics your gonna need big storage together with speed.

Take a look here. Lotsa good info
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/traydockesata.php

I've got to vouch for the high quality of Wiebetech stuff. They are well represented in the film editing business, and that's why I've decided to go with their products.

David, I'm curious about the 10K rpm SATA drive. How is the heat? Abnormally hot compared to a 7200 rpm drive? Boots faster...what about copying files to/from the drive? See a speed increase over the 7200 rpm drive? I too am looking to speed up disk access on a PowerMac G5 to run as a mail server. I want to keep things simple and as trouble free as possible, so I'm looking to either large capacity (300GB) 7200 rpm or 10K rpm drives.

Thanks...

Well I can't really speak to things like copying files because I don't use the 10,000 RPM drive for that. I have my system on it and my apps. All of my data is on one of the 120s and the second 120 is for back-up. So most of my file copying is between the two 120s. But, like I said, the computer is much more responsive...nothing I can really document but if I boot from my back-up volume which lives on one of the 120GB 7200 RPM drives, I can really see the dif. As to heat, there is no noticable difference in fan operation or noise level with the 10,000 RPM drive installed. I used the Swift Data 200 kit to install the additional drive and I think because of the way the additional drives are oriented, they really don't obstruct airflow at all.

DD

I have that setup as well. System on the 10k Raptor and my entire users folder on a Seagate drive. I am a believer that moving the users folder off the system drive made a bigger speed increase than did the 10 k drive and since I did both at the same time I saw a very noticeable speed bump when I installed

Here are instructions on moving the users folder This process is not for everyone depends on how you use your Mac and your comfort level in modifying your OS

Deborah,
If you want the combination of performance and size I'd get a Maxtor 300Gb SATA with the 16Mb cache. There's no other drive in that size with that kind of performance out there (so far). The Raptors are really nice drives I hear but the tiny size and high price is what turns me off to them. I love Western Digital, as a matter of fact their 120Gb drives were my favortes for a while.