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The Power Macintosh G4 is series of personal desktop computers released by Apple in 1999, and sold through 2004. This page is for the M5183 designation.

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Can I put any standard modern hard drive into my G4?

Its got the original 40gb which is full, inaccessible and unrepairable. Want to put in 2 new hd's - something bigger for the OS and a much bigger second for storage. I want to reload OS 9 and then eventually Tiger. Will also be adding a SCSI card.

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@jamie - please explain the down vote on this question.

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There are 28 machines with the designation of M5183 but all use the same hard drives. Note the size limits!

A. What's the SCSI card for?

B, That drive is a PATA, IDE or Ultra ATA/66

Standard Hard Drive: 18, 36 GB (7200 RPM) Int. HD Interface: Ultra ATA/66 (ATA-5)

Details: Shipped by default with either an 18 GB or 36 GB Ultra2 SCSI drive (and corresponding PCI card).

Can officially support two Ultra ATA/66 hard drives onboard -- drives larger than 128 GB are not supported. It could be configured with up to three Ultra2 SCSI drives at the time of purchase as a build-to-order option.

Power Mac G4 M5183 Hard Drive Replacement

OWC will probably still have compatible drives. I remember that I did use larger drives that I had partitioned to under the 128 MB limit but don't remember if I did the partitions on a later machine. Knowing your specific machine might help.

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SCSI is for an old scanner. Turns out I was able to erase and reinstall, so far seems to running well. Looks like MacMall has compatible SSHD's too.

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OWC is MacMall

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I know, I just like alliteration. Thank you for your help. This is a great website.

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Krispy Kremes are cool, correct?

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Modern HDDs are not compatible with your G4, since these days all standard HDDs are fitted with a SATA interface, and the G4 uses the IDE/PATA interface for HDDs and ODDs.

New PATA HDDs (old stock) are still available however, in capacities up to 500GB or so, but I'm not sure if the G4 can handle HDDs larger than 120GB.

If I remember correctly, Apple used IBM/Hitachi HDDs with custom firmware for lower noise, but standard PATA HDDs should work.

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