New hard drive for G3 333 Bondi Blue iMac

Hey! I have a houseful of Macs, too! I need to tell my wife I'm not alone in my madness.

I'm not sure about the tray-loading iMacs, but the slot-loaders' logic board drive controller cannot "see" anything bigger than, I think, 128GB--maybe it's 137; I've seen both numbers tossed around. That's why you got the recommendation to stay at 120GB, as the next larger increment in drives jumps to 160GB. This is not unique to the iMac; my Beige G3 has the same limitation with the on-board drive controller.

As for speed, I went through this recently. At one time, 7200-rpm drives were considered too "hot-running" for the passively-cooled iMacs. At Thanksgiving I had to install a larger drive in our iMac 400DV for my daughter and all I had in the parts kit was a fairly recent 60GB 7200-rpm Maxtor. I asked about heat production in this forum and the consensus was that heat was not a problem with newer fast drives. The drive seems happy in its new home at last report.

As for finding such things, this site:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/3.5-IDE-ATA/

shows several new 80G drives. My personal preference is Western Digital Caviar. I have no information on the "SpeedTools" software shown on the same page claiming to use software to break the 128GB barrier. Note the site has a number off caveats for this product. 'Nuff said.

Hey fellow Mac Nuts,
I'm sitting here with about 20 iMacs, iBooks, G4s, and B&Ws in my Mac Geek lab. I set them up for the school my kids go to and various inner city schools I donate to.
The trays I set up with OS 9.2.2 and image Pre K - 2nd grade apps. The slots get 10.3.9 , GarageBand, iLife, video apps and are set up for online.
My 9 year old daughter had a chance to swap her 400 Pink (Strawberry) for a 700 Snow but turned me down flat.
You're 160 will most likely be seen as 128 but shouldn't be a problem. I set up a 500 GB in a 400 for a donation to a video class but now I'm waiting for a G4 to show up. Just had 5 G. E. go by but they were destined for my kids' school.

Richard

Like Richard said, your iMac won't "see" but the first 128G of the 160. I've not installed a drive larger than my drive controller can handle, so cannot say for sure if there are any "gottchas" lurking. I know others all over these forums are running larger drives and hitting the 128GB limit and don't seem to be suffering.

If you're concerned about heat--and that's a reasonable concern with any computer--you can do a few thing with your workspace to help keep the "baby" cool. Remember: air goes in the bottom and comes out the top. Therefore keeping papers, books, etc away from the base of the computer and not stacking anything on top will go a long way to controlling heat. I try to keep the exhaust vents (in your case, the top) at least six inches from any other surface. Example, I would not shove the iMac under a desk shelf that came closer than six inches from the top of the case.

Often setting the computer on little blocks allows better air intake. Usually raising it an inch or so is sufficient to improve circulation.

It was hard to let go of my old beige PowerMac; I still have guilt.

You should! I have two Beige minitowers. One is set up as a photo station and is heavily upgraded with a 500mHz processor, full boat of RAM, 200G of hard drives, Panther, and a big video card. That one may never leave. The other is set up for playing with UltraSCSI hard drives and is a dedicated OS9 machine. I love 'em. Close to a bullet-proof computer.

Allan

Just in case you haven't heard.

The tray loading iMac, such as your 333, requires the boot partition to be within 8gig. Since there are hidden partitions before the first visible partition, people recommend that you make the first visible partition 7.5 gig to 7.9gig. The machines support upto a 128gig Parallel ATA drive. (* There may be a chance that the mac os will chop these hidden partitions out of the first visible one. *)

You need to get the 3 and a 1/2 inch ATA harddrive. They are also known as parallel ATA or PATA. The iMac was designed to take a maximum drive size of 128gig. The 120gig drives are the largest readily available. People have put larger drives in the machine, but only 128gig is usable.

I suggest you create a 127gig partition and leave the rest of the drive as free space. That way you will not have to worry about the boundary conditions.

Robert

I have no direct hand experience with how well a drive larger than 128gig will work. I have put an 80gig drive in both a 233 and a 333. I have seen several reliable posters stating that they had direct experience put larger drive (>128) in a tray machine. A month or so ago I read a few posts of people reporting that they heard of problems with larger drives (>128). You never know what the cause of a problem was. To avoid such problems I theorized that a 127 gig partition and leave the rest of the visible drive as free space would minimize any problem.

Robert