This cannot be real. Tell me this is a practical joke!
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2012, August 12 - 8:12am
#1
High Capacity HDD in unsupported G3's/G4's
Comments
2012, August 12 - 8:57am
#2
Yeah it's real. We used to have extended discussions about large drive support in the OS9 and PMG4 Apple Discussion Groups back in the day - some of those in the discussions, I suspect, now frequent this sites discussions too.
Can't remember the reason why, but having the drive formatted with OSX 10.2 or later was key. Of course, despite what the ad says, the PMG4 MDD and the QuickSilver 2002 before it could use and boot of larger drives without that driver software.
Just a reminder for others, that this is an IDE limitation, so SCSI drives and FireWire drives on older Macs can take drives as large as they come.
I had enough 120GB drives to share amongst all my G4 Macs. But when it came time to hand down larger-still drives to the older Macs I caught an AEC-6280M PCI card on eBay / TradeMe for a few dollars. Supports up to 4 large capactity IDE drives on twin ATA-133 ports, in addition to the two drives on the internal ATA-66 and the one drive I put in the Zip drive slot on the ATA-33.
The Acard AEC-6280M works perfectly back to OS8.5.
There were also other cards available from Sonnet.
2012, August 12 - 11:37am
#3
despite what the ad says, the PMG4 MDD and the QuickSilver 2002 before it could use and boot of larger drives without that driver software.
The ad mentions "older (Pre-Mirrored Door) G4 and G3 Macintoshes" as not being able to... Probably, this should be revised to "older (Pre-QuickSilver 2002) G4 and G3 Macintoshes"...
BTW, this fix isn't exactly cheap. No Apple support? Tsk! Even Microsoft with Windows 2K, around 2001-02 came up with a free greater than 128 GB NTFS fix with their 3rd revision of that OS...
Lucky for me I inherited a huge box of 80 GB and smaller IDE drives (+ a few SCSI's) amongst several boxes of treasures on eBay earlier this year (Aus$20)... probably enough old drives to see either me or my old kit out, whichever comes first 
2012, August 12 - 5:15pm
#4
Oh...
...my glob. (•_•)
2012, August 12 - 10:54am
#5
I can witness about successful use of this Hi-Cap extension up to 10.5 It´s really good. 
2012, August 12 - 4:46pm
#6
I Used to use that driver on my server (when it ran on the sawtooth / quicksilver '01 & imac g3 for backups) and it worked perfectly, even had a 500gb sata drive hoocked up to the cd ata bus on the imac g3 (with a sata -> ide adapter). And for it not being cheap, you can use it on however meny macs you want (you never get asked for a serial number is you only install the hi-cap driver and ignore the other crap - well at least i was never asked for a sn)