Then it was a question of whether the SATA cables I had on hand would reach. I wound up swapping them into the back bay, which meant I had to move my two ATA drives from the ATA100 bus to the ATA66. The SATA power connectors on the adapter cable stuck out enough when connected that it took a lot of fiddling to keep them from being crunched by the ATA connector and the cable for the optical drive when I closed the case, and it was really still too tight for me to be comfortable with it. I had two SATA drives installed in my MDD's front (ATA66) bay, briefly.
It is a tight fit, especially in the front drive bay. Again, I'm thinking of just a warehouse for files - not for thoroughbred performance, but so I can copy files to a faster drive to use when needed. With Hitachi 1TB internal drives going for less than $90 now, it seems to be economical and efficient (no external drives to connect) to go this route and have the storage inside the computer.
You've explained that using the adapter will result in much slower data transfer rates than with the PCI card, but if my intent is to use the 1TB Sata drives +just for storage alone+ - say on one or two of the 4 available buses, and then when I need the files to use in a video project, and transfer those files to the (faster) drive on the front bay ATA/100 bus - wouldn't that save me the cost of a controller card? In other words, the Satas would be in the carrier under the optical drive, and the two front bays, buses 1 and 2 would have the usual (and smaller capacity) ATA drives with the System files, Startup items, applications, and anything needing the higher data rates. Gambling away a dollar to find out is not going to break the bank, but I am curious. Or would it make a big difference using certain types of applications? I'm not into gaming.just Photoshop, Final Cut Express and iWork/Pages.mostly. Then again, I'm buying the 1TB drive (or maybe 2 of them) mainly for storage of video files. Question is, can I get by with this converter? It seems to be as fast as the Firmtek product - except that Firmtek has two SATA connections.Īlso, someone on another forum thinks that the drive connected to bay 1 and 2 is faster than when connected to 3 and 4 (the carrier under the optical drive box).īottom line: even if the 1TB drive is a bit slower using it with an adapter, wouldn't it at least be the same transfer rate as the IDE drive? I'd be satisfied with that.
W0QQitemZ280421565829QQcategoryZ90715QQcmdZViewItemQQtrksidZ] which seems too good to be true, but you can see it here: This item offers the same data transfer rate of up to 1.5 Gbps. This seems to allow me to plug the SATA drive into the 14-pin ribbon connector.I'm not sure about the power supply cable, but I guess the PS 1 2 or 3 would plug in to the drive same as the ATA HD.
So at OWC, I see the: FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 Serial ATA/150 Dual Channel Mac PCI Controller - Use Serial ATA (SATA) drives in any PowerMac with an available PCI Slot! The SeriTek/1S2 boosts overall system performance with data transfer rates of up to 150MBytes/sec or 1.5Gbits/sec.īut as that's about $70 with shipping, I go to eBay to see what's there, and I find something called an IDE to SATA motherboard converter adapter. These being SATA, and the G4 has IDE (and/or ATA?) I seem to need a PCI card with a connector cable to the drives -instead of the usual 14 pin ribbon connector and the power supply cable hook up. I'd like to add one or two 1TB hard drives to my MDD 1.25 Ghz.