[G4] Drives?

[John Niven]

You cannot use SATA drives unless you have a SATA
interface. For a MDD that means a PCI card.

If you have no investment already in upgraded drives
AND you have a a spare PCI slot, SATA drives are a
great investment. The cables are very thin which tends
to help airflow inside the case, plus if you move up
to a better machine latter they are more likely to be
usable.

The analogy: parallel ATA hose uses a wide, low
pressure pipe to fill a bucket, whereas serial ATA
uses a thin pipe but running at a very high pressure
to push the same, or more, water through in a given
time.

ATA133 = 133Mbytes per second.
SATA = 1.5Gbits per second.

I believe these two are comparable in throughput.

History made wider busses to increase throughput,
without increasing the clock speed. A good example is
the 64bit wide PCI slots in G4 towers. They only run
at 33MHz but if you have a 64bit PCI card, then they
have the same throughput as a more modern 66MHz 32bit
PCI.

But wider busses are harder to design and route in
small spaces. So the trend is to make narrow busses
that are well designed and shielded so that they can
be run faster. 
John

--- Dan Watson <ypsi7267 at gmail.com> wrote:

> An ATA is what is also known as a "parallel ATA" The
> other is a
> "serial" ata, which is supossed to be faster. I
> don't believe it will
> work in your MDD
> 
> On Jan 30, 2008 7:33 PM, Dan A Currie
> <dancurr at frontiernet.net> wrote:
> >
> >  Hello,
> >
> >  What is the difference between ATA and SATA hard
> drives?
> >
> >  Will SATA drives work in my G4 MDD?
> >
> >  Thanks,
> >
> >  Dan



      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for last minute shopping deals?  
Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.  http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping