Question 1

will this work with the power mac g3 blue and white to replace the failing hdd?

Accepted Answer

I am a PC technician and I know very little about Mac-specific hardware but I would still like to try to answer your question since I have lots of experience with this part: This can theoretically be used with a CF card to replace ANY IDE hard drive, so if the G3 uses a standard 40-pin IDE hard drive then this should work as a replacement.  With that said, CF cards are generally better for replacing hard drives on more vintage systems than newer ones because of the way CF cards perform.  On the PC side, they do great on systems that run MS-DOS or Windows 3.1.  Windows 95/98 will also run well from a CF card as long as you're not using the card to host a swap file (i.e. virtual memory) and the same will be true for Mac OSes.  CF cards do really poorly with the rapid random reads/writes of small amounts of data that is required when hosting a swap file.  The life of the CF card would be shortened and the machine's overall performance would be poor if used in this way.  If you have enough real physical RAM memory in your machine that you can get away with disabling virtual memory (and assuming MacOS actually allows the user to do this) then it'll probably work well with a high-performance CF card.  If you need to run with a swap file on the drive then yes it would technically still work (at least for a while) but you'd be much better off with a traditional mechanical hard drive.

Question 2

Is it necessary to turn off my computer to switch Compact Flash cards using this adapter?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you must turn off your computer to switch cards, as this product does not support hot-swapping of flash cards while the PC is powered on.

Question 3

Can I use this StarTech.com IDE Adapter to boot from a Compact Flash card?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this adapter allows a Compact Flash card to be used as bootable storage.

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