From: Gary Hsueh (ghsueh@mac.com)
Date: Mon Aug 25 2003 - 18:34:29 PDT
It may be worth comparing SATA and parallel/UltraATA, and considering your time frame and future use of the drives.
UltraATA controllers and drives are common and cheap. Current drives don't ever reach the theoretical limit of 133 MB/s (more like 45 MB/s for a fast drive). Controller cards usually provide two channels and support two drives per channel (four drives total).
SATA will become much more common in the future. Controllers and drives are not as common but are relatively cheap (is the FirmTek card even shipping yet?). For now you'll have to look a little more carefully for sale prices. The controllers I've seen for PC provide two (sometimes four) channels, only one drive per channel. Current drives don't reach the theoretical limit of 150 MB/s. And because there is only one drive per channel, faster drives in the future may still not reach the limit (whereas an UltraATA channel could potentially get saturated with two drives working at the same time).
Apple's G5 comes with built-in SATA support for two drives max, and from the looks of it you can't string up a thick UltraATA cable to the drive area. Apple has stated it does not support UltraATA-to-SATA adapters in the G5, so no matter what you won't be able to use an UltraATA drive in a G5.
So what it boils down to is, if you want to use these drives in a G5 or some other SATA enclosure someday, then you should buy SATA drives and a SATA controller card for your current G4. Keep the two existing drives on the built-in UltraATA bus.
If you only intend to use these drives in the G4 or some other UltraATA enclosure (say, with an ATA-to-FireWire bridge), then you could save money on UltraATA drives and plunk down some money for an UltraATA controller card. You can run two drives per channel, but if possible, run one on each channel for the best performance.
This year it seems hard drives are always on sale somewhere...perhaps my best advice is, don't let one particular sale force your hand if you can help it.
Gary
On Monday, August 25, 2003, at 01:39PM, E. Bond Francisco <ebondf@uclink.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>Folks,
>
>I have a G4 800 DP. It came with a 40G drive, and I added a 60G Maxtor
>internal last summer. I'd like to take advantage of a CompUSA sale for 160
>(or is it 120) Maxtor internal drives for ~$100. I understand that I can
>install those internally (as long as I have a wind tunnel fan set up next to
>the computer to cool them down!) but that I need to purchase an ATA
>controller to be able to take advantage of the extra Gigs.
>
>Someone suggested that I look for a Serial ATA controller card for these two
>additional drives. Can anyone tell me if this is good advice or not? Can one
>SATA controller work on all 4 drives (I doubt that the two original drives
>are Serial ATA). I spent some time searching, and came up with
>http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/ as about the only source of SATA controllers
>for Macintosh.
>
>If anyone has any good tips on how to go about configuring these two drives
>into the mix, I'd appreciate it?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Bond
>_______________
>(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)
>E. Bond Francisco
>CMMS Administrator
>Physical Plant - Campus Services
>UC Berkeley
>510-643-5523
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