OS X and Western Digital Hard Drive Adventures with a Blue and White G3

This week I went to visit my dad in California. He had been living in a smaller apartment for quite some time and had many of his things in storage, including his blue G3, which he purchased new in 1999 and put into storage not very long after. Recently he moved into a larger place and started taking things out of storage; the blue G3 was among them.

His blue G3 had shipped as a 400 MHz machine with a 9 GB SCSI 2 hard drive, 256 MB RAM, and Mac OS 8.5. He had purchased a matching Apple 15" LCD Studio Display (which, he commented, cost him more back then than the 17" Apple display costs now), as well as an Epson Stylus 1280 photo printer (the newer version of my 1200).

Once he set it up in his new apartment, he upgraded to Mac OS 9.0 and installed Office 2001. Other than that, all applications were from 1999 or before. He had Mac OS X 10.2 CDs but said he couldn't get it to install. I had no problem installing 10.2 (but I upgraded Mac OS 9 to 9.2.1 first), and after downloading several updates (which took quite some time themselves), it was almost as good as a new Mac.

While Web browsing in OS 9 seemed buggy and slow with Internet Explorer 4.5 (the latest version that was installed), Safari is now probably 3 times as fast (I'm amazed that it's no slower than browsing on my G4) - and the system's only crashed once in OS X (for the curious, it was an odd problem where I was unable to empty the Trash, I force quit the Finder and then found that I was running two Finders, neither of which I could get access to, so I was forced to hit the reset button). I installed Office X as well. Ith isn't as fast as 2001, but it seems to work fairly well.

The only issue I notice is that with OS X, the system doesn't go into deep sleep, perhaps due to the SCSI card installed (it had been an issue when I had my G4 tower also, under 10.1, but was fixed with 10.2 on that machine).

Some things are definitely slower under OS X. Starting up takes much longer - not a big deal, but a slight annoyance - and processor intensive applications are slower. Miniaturizing a window in the dock is delayed slightly due to the 16 MB video card, but menu fading and the other effects don't seem too slow. Nothing's nearly as fast as on my G4 PowerBook, but it's pretty quick for a machine less than half the clock speed and without the AltiVec engine.

As for the LCD display; everything's much brighter - whites are clearer, colors are less washed out. My guess is that it wasn't calibrated correctly under OS 9. And the photo printer - no drivers needed even be installed, it worked immediately (unlike mine, where I had to download and install drivers).

The downside of having all this up to date software is that the hard drive tends to fill up quickly, to the point where the 9 GB had about 200 MB empty. Because of this, we decided to buy a new 80 GB Western Digital special edition hard drive, especially since it had a rebate.

A half hour after installing it, I was still trying to get the drive to show up on the desktop. I had formatted it, reformatted it - everything --- and it wasn't showing up. I checked the cable and the jumpers, but it still wouldn't mount.

Finally I decided to connect the drive to the last connector on the cable instead of the middle one. The drive mounted. Great, I thought, and copied over around 3 GB worth of files.

I shut it off and came back to it later, only to find the folder I had copied was missing, even though the 3 GB of space was being used on the drive! I ran Disk Utility and Norton in OS 9 - the drive was full of errors, but whenever it was repaired, I'd run it again, and the same errors would show up. I spent several hours with it and basically determined that the problem is the drive, not anything else. Calling Western Digital for a replacement will be our next step.

I must say that an upgraded blue G3 seems to be plenty fast enough for most of what I do (it lags somewhat in Photoshop, but that doesn't bother me since I do a lot of that work on my beige G3, which isn't really any faster!). I suspect that my dad will find it pretty fast also; he figured it should last him another year or two.

Once that hard drive is working and he adds more RAM, I think it should last longer. After all, many beige G3s are about 6 years old now, and for many users, they still serve the purpose just as they did when they were new, and they have no plans to replace them in the near future.