On Feb 24, 2004, at 05:52 am, Thomas Baker wrote:
Second question: there are two nearly identical Hitachi/IBM ATA 160-gig
drives for sale on the OWC website:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=6502&Item=HIT08K0464 and
http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=6243&Item=HIT13G0254. The
first is described as "parallel ATA" for $116, and the other one is "serial
ATA" for $147. What's the difference between the two drives besides price,
and which one would be best for this Mac?
The 'Parallel' ATA drive will go straight in and work 100% however you will only be able to use 128MB of it, because Apple dragged their feet on upgrading to ATA133 (it was only used eventually in MDD G4s IIRC) which is the only old style ATA that can read above the 137GB (unformatted) barrier.
The Serial ATA (aka SATA150) will require a Serial ATA PCI card that will work in a Mac, and boot if you want ti to be totally seamless. These are not cripplingly expensive, however they are an additional cost on top of a more expensive drive *but* are also more future proof and provide better performance all round than ATA133. SATA is really a bigger step than just bus speed (SATA150 = 150MHz vs. ATA133 = 133MHz). It incorporates a dramatic improvement in interrupt usage that allows your computer to do more work while the drive is loading or saving, which on things like massive photoshop documents where they are processed on the fly as they save, leads to faster saves. It also has less impact on programs that load from disk as they run, or use scratch disks while they are processing. This is why it is used in the G5.
It is really just a case of what you want to do with your machine. If it's just being used to store MP3s and family photos get a (or a pair of even!) 120GB 'Parallel' ATA drive. If you need all the CPU bandwidth you can get while accessing the disk go with a SATA card and SATA drive.
-- Mark Benson
AIM - SilValleyPirate MSN - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit FlatPackMacs online: <http://fpm.68kmac.com> Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>
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