[G4] Options for adding disk space to Power Mac G4?

[Tony Gamble]

Absolutely right... I stand corrected.  The Sawtooth can indeed boot  
from its onboard USB... which from what I gathered at the Apple site  
was only USB 1.1... a paltry 12 Mbps.  Not terribly practical for  
booting a full OS, and I'm not certain that bootability would spill  
over onto an add-in 2.0 card.  And yes, the ATA/66 interface is  
definitely faster than FW400, though real life comparison would show  
negligible difference.  Firewire 400 will definitely outperform the  
480 Mbps-rated USB 2.0 for a couple of reasons; one, the Firewire  
controller does all its own work, not relying on the CPU; and two, any  
single device on the USB chain is limited to two thirds of the maximum  
bandwidth.

Thank you for pointing out my errors... it gave me to initiative to go  
out on the web and correct my preconceived and erroneous notions.

Tony

On 15-Jan-08, at 8:10 PM, Eric Smith wrote:

> Hi Tony,
>
> Actually I believe (but I'm not certain) that the Sawtooth will
> boot from USB. But I disagree that Firewire would outperform ATA/66,
> since it only has FW 400. That's a max of 50 MB/s vs. 66.
> USB 2.0 would promise a max of 60, but I doubt that actual speeds
> can attain that.
>
> Eric
>
> Tony Gamble wrote:
>> I highly recommend this option, except make certain it's Firewire  
>> and not USB (your Mac will not boot from USB).  An external  
>> Firewire HD would greatly outperform your internal ATA/66 bus.   
>> Actually, make that two external HD's, one for Leopard and one of  
>> at least the same size or larger for Time Machine.  The Time  
>> Machine drive can be either FW or USB.
>> - Tony
>> On 14-Jan-08, at 11:12 PM, Richard Klein wrote:
>>>> 2. Install Leopard on an external Firewire 400 or USB 2.0 drive.
>>>> I think this would suffer in performance vs. an internal drive,
>>>> since this machine has ATA/66.
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