Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Hi, i'm upgrading an iMac G3, and I was wondering if this Hard Drive would work,http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WD800BB-7200RPM-Desktop/dp/B000093S8Z/ref= sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1393710799&sr=8-3&keywords=western+digital+80GB+pata:// If not, could you tell me a compatible drive that's not too pricey?
Thanks
iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11), Grape
Currently there are very few imac g3's left and so compatible hard drives are rare. As far as prive it seems fine however, (depending on usage) 80 gb might not be enough, in which case I would recomend buying an external hard drive, which, because the G3 supports usb, an average usb external hard drive should be fine.
There is a ceiling on hard disk drive capacity in older Macs, so be certain to read up on what that is before getting an ATA/IDE (parallel ATA) replacement hard disk drive. The bus speed is slower on those, so hopefully an ATA100 can work, though the computer spec is less. Data speed is also way slow.
A source of a few models, some above limit in iMac G3:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/ST3120213A/
Probably would not be worth the expense to put a SSD Legacy
OWC mercury in an iMac G3, but they have them for G4 Mac.
Since USB 1.1 is slow an external drive would be limited for Mac OS, and it would not support booting a clone or system copy should you be able to run an early version of OS X in addition to Mac OS 9.2.2 & before. An external with custom oxford-chipset will work to boot OS, via FW.
For external hard disk drives, see if your computer has FireWire 400 ports and look for an enclosure that supports booting Mac systems, and has its own power supply since the Mac ports can't be relied on to power an external hard disk drive reliably, least of all an older model. And hard drive data rate is very slow in these older Macs with drives inside the computer, and slower if accessed externally via USB1.1. The FW400, if available, is significantly faster.
If you get an enclosed hard disk drive with both FW400/800 and USB2/USB3.0 that would work OK with an older Mac. See the OWC pages for these; or call for advice. And note the speed the computer can access data to and from a hard disk drive is the bottleneck, so too fast of a hard disk drive and the drive will not be compatible.
Good luck & happy computing! 🙂
The upper limit for a drive volume in the G3 iMacs is 128GB, so that drive should work.
I believe the drive will work. I have an 80gig drive in my iMac g3 600.
Robert
And if you find a 160GB IDE/ATA, it will only use 128GB, however since some of that 160 is lost to formatting you really aren't losing that much off the top. I have a 160 in my iMac G3/400. I remember Keniche Watanabe suggesting here to set the rest above 128 as free space, so the system won't inadvertently wander off above the 128 limit.
There are some here, including refurbs. I would double check that the one you're seeing at Amazon is not a refurb.
Note: There are hidden partitions before the first visible partition. The hidden partitions are small. I think they are around 200meg. Most folks let 1g for these hidden partitions. That makes the first visible partition at 127 gig.
hidden + visible within 128gig.
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
# Press return to run a command.
sudo fdisk -l
To see all partitions ( i remember ? )
Yeah I was thinking of the small formatting partition. I think there's only one. Just happen to have the G3 booted this morning and I can see that the Debug menu in Disk Utility does not have the show every partition option, the way Snow does. But I was able to see that I set the main partition at 127.63 GB.
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
# Press return to run a command.
# here is what i see from the terminal. Disk Utility app would see partition 10 and greater. The number of hidden partitions depends on how you format the dirve.
# Notice I had the wrong command earlier. Here is what i needed.
sudo pdisk -l
mac $ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple_partition_scheme *74.5 GB disk0
1: Apple_partition_map 31.5 KB disk0s1
2: Apple_Driver43 28.0 KB disk0s2
3: Apple_Driver43 28.0 KB disk0s3
4: Apple_Driver_ATA 28.0 KB disk0s4
5: Apple_Driver_ATA 28.0 KB disk0s5
6: Apple_FWDriver 256.0 KB disk0s6
7: Apple_Driver_IOKit 256.0 KB disk0s7
8: Apple_Patches 256.0 KB disk0s8
9: Apple_Bootstrap 977.0 KB disk0s9
10: Apple_HFS Classic 1.1 GB disk0s10
11: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 3.2 GB disk0s11
12: Apple_HFS Macintosh-HD 69.9 GB disk0s12
13: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 177.4 MB disk0s13The sudo command will ask for your administrator password. No characters will appear when typing your password. Press return when done typing. sudo stands for super user do. It's just like root. Be careful.
mac $ sudo pdisk -l
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/rdisk0'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
2: Apple_Driver43*Macintosh 56 @ 64
3: Apple_Driver43*Macintosh 56 @ 120
4: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 56 @ 176
5: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 56 @ 232
6: Apple_FWDriver Macintosh 512 @ 288
7: Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh 512 @ 800
8: Apple_Patches Patch Partition 512 @ 1312
9: Apple_Bootstrap untitled 1954 @ 149319048
10: Apple_HFS Apple_HFS_Untitled_1 2254440 @ 263968 ( 1.1G)
11: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled 6617188 @ 149321002 ( 3.2G)
12: Apple_HFS Apple_HFS_Untitled_2 146538496 @ 2780552 ( 69.9G)
13: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap 363298 @ 155938190 (177.4M)
14: Apple_Free Extra 262144 @ 1824 (128.0M)
15: Apple_Free Extra 262144 @ 2518408 (128.0M)
Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=156301488 (74.5G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
Drivers-
1: 23 @ 64, type=0x1
2: 36 @ 120, type=0xffff
3: 21 @ 176, type=0x701
4: 34 @ 232, type=0xf8ffiMac Hard Drive