Ask Jacob

The Blue & White G3 (B&W) hard drive size limit has been one of the most frequent questions of my technical years. It all centers on the two different revisions of the B&W logic board. Rev A logic boards supports only a single 6GB hard drive reliably and Rev B can support two 120 GB hard drives. You can tell which revision logic you have by the part number on the board. Look for the Apple copyright information printed on the logic board and below it will be a string of characters in one of the following two configurations XXX-09XX-A or XXX-10XX-A. The “X” is used in place of unimportant information. 09 indicates that it is a rev A logic board and the 10 means that it is a rev B.

Since you have a rev B B&W then you are going to be limited to a 120GB drive size without some additional hardware. Sonnet’s Tempo ATA133 card is actually what I recommend all B&W owners use for adding hard drives. This will fit into one of your open PCI slots and you will use the included ribbon cable to connect to the drive. This will replace the ribbon cable between the hard drive and logic board. There are several benefits to upgrading this way. You will have significantly faster communication to the hard drive as well as greater stability. You can add up to four drives to one card. Most importantly for you, it will see the full capacity of your 250GB hard drive.