like to try some HD speed in your Mac for cheap?

[SteveJobs]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7898206&st=raptor&type=product&id=1149205976408

Can anyone suggest a good SATA card for my AGP PM G4 (Sawtooth)? I might just try some out.

[elmo3]

Your sawtooth will get HOT! with that puppy inside.

Got room for a slot fan?

At the very least, swap out your factory power supply and fan with aftermarket pieces for better cooling.

[silvarios]

The OWC 2+2 card works well enough for me. Only does 1.5 Gbps. However, you get two internal or two external or one of each.


Forgot the product link.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20W...SATAPCI2P/

Nathan

[lafinfil]

Isn't the Sawtooth's 100MHz bus going to negate the drive speed anyway ?

[OWC Larry]

Be it SATA (1.5G) or SATA II (3.0G) - the highest data transfer rates from a single drive are still in the 75-85 Meg per second range.

The OWC card is only 1.5G - but - today's drives really don't take advantage of what the 3G allows and as a result, doesn't really matter in terms of the card except in much higher end deployments.

Each SATA channel is it's own - so, unlike ATA where two drives on the bus Master/Slave share the bandwidth for transfer - each SATA drive has it's own pipeline.

If you had two modern ATA drives and upgraded from an ATA/66 card to an ATA/133 card - you'd definitely get a significant improvement with both drives active transferring data since two of today's drives can saturate a 66Meg/s bus and even will a 133Meg/sec bus too.

But not so with SATA since the drive doesn't have to share... until single drives are transferring more than 150 meg/sec, not going to be a whole lot of benefit to 3G SATA II which really just added some additional command set features (that happened to cause some of those fun compatibility issues in the G5 and with some of the earlier Mac SATA Controllers till disable was offered on drives...).

Anyway -

we've seen over 100 Megs/second SUSTAINED via our SATA card with 2 drives striped in an accelerated PowerMac G4 100MHz bus.

[jdc]

why would you need a drive like that?

everyone always says "that would make a great boot drive!"

how many freakin times a day are you booting?

[OWC Larry]

Using a fast drive for startup also benefits OS X performance for everything else too... all that caching, system file reads/writes, etc... Faster main drive makes for a boost across everything. I'd not recommend doing a stripe for the main system drive, don't think the benefit there is justified for most purposes when you get 65-75MB/Sec on s single drive sustained... plus, for a lot of the system reads/writes, a stripe may not offer any gain as they are typically very small files that wouldn't even fully saturate the drives cache...

anyway.....

In pretty much any Mac - replacing a hard drive that's 2+ years old with one that's current today results in a noticeably gain to performance. The older the drive being replaced, the greater the performance gain that is there to perceive.

[quote jdc]why would you need a drive like that?

everyone always says "that would make a great boot drive!"

how many freakin times a day are you booting?

[Mr645]

Get two and do RAID 0. You'll need a solid back up routine but speeds are awesome. I always get a second drive for my Macs for RAID set up and use a Mercury FW800 drive from OWC for back ups :-)

My dual 2.5 came with a 160GB seagate, I bought another 160GB Seagate and the combined RAID delivers about 90MBps and is a nice, noticable speed boost.

Jon

[lafinfil]

>
> how many freakin times a day are you booting?
>


Depends on what version of Winders you're running

;-)

[BigGuynRusty]

[quote OWC Larry]not going to be a whole lot of benefit to 3G SATA II which really just added some additional command set features (that happened to cause some of those fun compatibility issues in the G5 and with some of the earlier Mac SATA Controllers till disable was offered on drives...).
Wish that worked Larry, on the Western Digital's putting the jumper to enable SATAI does nothing to help the locking up this drive does while on the factory SATA bus. I have 6X400GB WD's that a client purchased, I will probably sell them to a PC guy. It is Apple's fault that could probably be fixed with a firmware update.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/WD40...l#storytop

BGnR