Re: Striping internal drives on a Mac G4 dual 125

Assuming your configuration has the internal boot drive on the ATA 100 bus, the two 180GB WDs (8MB cache?) are then sharing the ATA 66 bus in a Master-Slave relationship for the RAID0. This is not a proper RAID0 since the read/write between the drives is sequential, not simultaneous. Each drive in the RAID should be a Master, on it's own discrete channel.

As mentioned, it is possible to do the external FW boot, with four internal drives hooked up as a RAID, but if configured as one big RAID, it will run at the slowest bus speed, 66, and is still a Master-Slave relationship. The boot drive can also be kept internal, installed lower optical bay, but this is only an ATA 33 bus. It does work, although not the greatest way to go.

A superior solution would be installing a PCI RAID controller card. A very good performer is the Acard 6885M, which allows 4 independent channels (2 or 3 channels also possible with this card). Acard has a specific configuration (on the 4-channel) where one of the RAID drives is installed in the upper optical bay, thereby permitting the internal boot drive to run off the ATA 100 bus. I've run this 4-channel set-up for some time in a G4 DP 1.25 MDD, AJA Io, typically working with 10-bit UC, and it's been just fine.

Hope this is useful.

...Tom