| Friday, October 25, 2002 |
14:49 - Makes me wanna buy more hard drives
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Kris' new G4 tower arrived today. After the usual crowd of gawkers stopped draping themselves over it, as they'd done the other day with his new Cinema Display, like a bunch of marionette spiders dangled by a puppeteer, we took a closer look at the hard drive carriers. I'd thought the (single) carrier in my old 450 was well designed; but whatever else one might say about this current form factor (does anybody know what the real code name for this iteration is? I'm sure it can't be "Wind Tunnel"), it's one of their better designs.
Both carriers have space for two disks. The main carrier, on the ATA-100 bus, is vertically positioned against the inner wall; it's not screwed down (though there's a hole for a screw if you choose to put one in). Instead, there's a white clip that you can pull back with a finger, and lift the carrier up and out:
 
The carrier has extra screws in it for the second disk, if and when you install one. To reinstall the carrier, just snap it back into place.
Then there's the second carrier, on the ATA-66 bus. The connector cables are positioned right where you would need them to go, and the carrier (which is the same unit as the primary one) is mounted horizontally below the optical drives. It too has a white finger clip, and slides out from a couple of rail tabs that hold it in place (you have to slide it back in along the tabs). The screw hole on this one which corresponds to the one on the primary carrier would be unreachable except by a trained rat; so there's a second screw lug which you can reach, on the left.
These may not be the fastest disk buses on the planet, but the machine itself is certainly expansion-friendly. More so than any Mac in recent memory, I believe.
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