[G4] Hard drive upgrade options?

[John Smutko]

Hi Kristen-

You'll definitely see benefit from the SATA, I've got this:

http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1v4/

in my Sawtooth running two 1TB WD Green SATA drives.  Disk Utility tells me that I can RAID them up if I choose, but since I'm running 10.5.8 (it's also got a 1.8GHz processor and a Radeon 9800 Pro in it) I actually use one drive as Boot, and the other as a Time Machine drive, which accomplishes the same thing as RAID 1 with some level of archiving as well.

-John

> Greetings Kristen,
> 
> I have a MDD 1.25Ghz Dual Processor (167Mz Buss) and I have a ACARD 6280M installed which is currently connect to a Samsung 500Gb SATA Spinpoint HDD which is my main boot disk. The ACARD 6280M is also connected to a SeaGate 750Gb SATA drive which is used my system backup drive. Also in my system is a Western Digital 120Gb and a Maxtor 120Gb (OS 9.2.2)
> 
> I use to have the ACARD 6280M in my 1999 G4 PowerMac AGP Graphics (100Mz Buss.) I used the AGP Graphics along with the ACARD 6280M for more than 10 years, just recently moving into the MDD. I upgraded the AGP to a 1.4Mz processor.
> 
> The only weird thing is that the SATA drive show up in the "System Profiler" as SCSI drive, oh well they work just fine so who cares.
> 
> I also have a combination of 5 HDD in external drive cases 3 of which are connected via USB 2.0 and the other 2 are connected via Firewire.
> 
> Since one of the features of have a RAID drive is that you can remove one of the drives in case there is a failure without shutting down the system. Well that wouldn't work very well as both of the drives are contained in the second drive case within the MDD and there wouldn't be any way of removing one of them without removing the drive cage which has a power connector that requires a major operation to remove.
> 
> IMO the Gigabit isn't fast enough to warrant a SSD drive, most SATA drive can furnish data as fast a the Gigabit can use it!
> 
> Cheers