My main computer for many years was a slot loading iMac motherboard I built in to a Tonka truck. It can handle 512 megs, drives up to 128 gigs without extra software and up to 2 TB with Intech's ATA Hi-Cap software:
http://www.speedtools.com/STATA.html
You can use XPostFacto to keep the base OS in the first 8 gigs for booting, then boot in to a partition that's the rest of the 128 gigs, then have /Users be the rest of the drive above 128 gigs because files there aren't necessary until the OS has booted enough to load the ATA Hi-Cap driver.
For accelerators, some people sold Apple cards with a G4 swapped in place of the G3. I had one of those, but it wouldn't see all 512 megs properly (worked fine with 256 megs). But I also have a Sonnet HARMONi G3 accelerator with a 600 MHz G3 and Firewire:
http://www.welovemacs.com/hag3up.html
Note that by default this machine can only run up to 10.3, but I'm running Tiger thanks to XPostFacto. I still use it regularly, since I can run Mac Classic software on it, it has a 2 TB drive and has more than a terabyte of movies on it, and it has a serial port in place of the modem so I can print to an ImageWriter II. It even shares the ImageWriter over the network