On the notebook side, no G3 PowerBooks or iBooks support big drives. Macs that don’t include big drive support include tray-loading iMacs, slot-loading iMacs, beige G3s, blue & white G3s, Yikes! G4s, Sawtooth (a.k.a. This is also an issue with external FireWire and USB enclosures: Although the FireWire and USB specifications don’t limit drive size, not all of the bridge chips used in external enclosures support big drives. Big drives need 48-bit addressing, and almost all Macs built before 2002 don’t have built-in support for it.
Older IDE specifications made no provision for what have since come to be called “big drives” – those with over 128 GB of storage space. If you simply install a big drive in your older Mac, it’s only going to see it as a 128 GB drive. You must also be using Mac OS X 10.2 or later, as earlier versions of the Mac OS do not support big drives on the built-in IDE bus. The long answer: Yes, you can, but you may not be able to use more than 128 GB without some third-party assistance. Can I put a 160 GB or larger IDE hard drive in my iMac, eMac, Power Mac, iBook, or PowerBook?