[G4] SCSI Drive Question

[Philip J Robar]

On Jan 20, 2007, at 1:35 PM, Les Berkley wrote:

> I just bought an Adaptec/Apple 2040-U2W SCSI card for my G4 400  
> Sawtooth ... It occurred to me that now I can add a SCSI HD, which  
> would be a good deal faster than the machine’s ATA-66 interface.
No single drive can saturate the ATA-5 interface you have in your  
Sawtooth so you would be better off buying an ATA or SATA drive as any  
SCSI drive that would compete with today's fastest ATA/SATA drives  
would be both smaller and much more expensive than the ATA/SATA drive.  
(An SATA drive would of course require you to buy an SATA PCI card  
also.)

The big improvement in hard drive performance came from the switch  
from ATA-4 to ATA-5, which defined faster UDMA levels and required 80  
wire cables. While an ATA-6 or better interface will be somewhat  
faster due to the support of newer features, you will still get most  
of the benefit of a new ATA drive using your built-in ATA-5 interface.  
The major limitation of ATA-5 is that it will only address up to 128  
GiB of drive space. (Without a 3rd party driver which has it's own  
limitations.) If you want bigger and faster get an SATA PCI card and  
hard drive.
> I vaguely recall that I am limited to 9 or 18GB partitions?
That was only for older beige G3's. The only limitation of your  
machine is the 128 GiB size limit I mentioned above.
> Some of the SCSI HDs on eBay look incredibly cheap!
They're cheap because they're old and slow in comparison to any new  
7200 RPM ATA/SATA drive. Given that you can get new ATA drives for as  
low as $30 with a rebate and not much more without, it just doesn't  
make sense to use SCSI drives on a single user machine. Even a year or  
two old used ATA drive would be a better value for you.

The best place to check on hard drive performance is http://www.storagereview.com 
.


Phil
--
Lanie, I'm going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for  
everyone. That's worth going to jail for. That's worth anything. --  
Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present - Printcrime