[G4] Much Ado About Harddrives

[Wayne Clodfelter]

I am remarking, in place, below

Eric Wood wrote:
> 
I don't
> know of any external enclosures for serial ATA drives, and even if there 
> were one, it would negate the speed benefit of serial ATA, since serial 
> ATA operates much more quickly than Firewire or USB would permit.

I believe there are now Firewire enclosures that do work with SATA 
drives, and SATA drives generally cost less than equivalent sized PATA 
drives.
But there are also eSATA enclosures that connect to an eSATA PCI card 
and are fully SATA I and SATA II compliant.
I do not have eSATA but I do run 2 SATA drives (320GB Seagates) and 2 
PATA drives (750GB and 120GB Seagates) internally, and 3 external 
firewire drives (120GB ? brand Firewire 400, 120GB Seagate Firewire 800, 
and 500GB Seagate Firewire 800) on my QuickSilver. They do require 3 
separate PCI cards (the ATA for large drive support on this Mac).

IMHO, in the real world the speed difference of the drives is negligible 
compared to other aspects of my computing experience. A good video card, 
lots of RAM, a fast processor, and AMPLE SPACE on the hard drives are 
much more important.

Were I to start today, I probably would run SATA internally and eSATA
externally, for the price difference between SATA and PATA drives, and 
because that is the direction I believe the Mac is going.

But that's just my opinion. For now.

There's a lot of info out on the web if you google things like "sata pci 
mac" or "esata mac" or "esata enclosure" etc.
-- 
Regards,

Wayne Clodfelter
<wayne at troutnc.com>