[MisterRogers]

I'm thinking about installing a WD Raptor 74 Gig drive as my boot, and migrating my current Segate 160 Gig out to FW 800. I haven't been able to find any FW800 enclosures that are SATA. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

As an alternative, I could add a SATA PCI card and get an external SATA enclosure, But I think it'd be easier and adequate to hang it off the FW800 port. Any/all input would be appreciated.

[Cadaver]

Y'know, I've never seen one.
I suspect eventually they'll be available, but I don't know of any.
I have seen external SATA solutions, but no SATA to FireWire devices.

Keep looking, but I strongly suspect you'll need to either go PATA/FireWire or external SATA + PCI SATA controller.

Assuming you're using a G5 and both internal bays are already full, you may be stuck.

For the G4 owners who might be reading, and assuming you have room, you may do better to leave your current HD on the internal ATA bus and install a PCI SATA card and mount the Raptor internally as well.

[Cadaver]

Some links that may be helpful if building an external SATA solution:
Bare Feats test of SATA RAID - they liked this FirmTek SATA card. Only $64 and faster than a more expensive ACard model.

[MisterRogers]

Thanks Cadaver. Yep, running a G5. The more I think about it, I'm leaning toward the SATA PCI card/SATA drive in SATA enclosure approach. Pretty simple, and should be fastest; though I'm not sure that SATA would even saturate the FW800 bus. I have checked out barefeats. Good stuff, but no clues. Anyway, thanks for the response.

[Dr.Michael]

Hm, correct me if I am wrong:

FW 800 makes 800 MBit/sec, that is 100MByte/sec.

The harddrive has ATA100 or ATA133, which means 100 MByte/sec or 133MBytes/Sec.
This fits well together.
Now is there any harddrive around here that manages 100 MBytes/sec in read or write mode?

I bet no.

So its no use in terms of speed to have a SATA interface for an external firewire drive. The ATA interface is fast enough for FW 800 and the hds are slower than the interfaces.

right or not?

So, if there is no performace gain its unlikely that anyone builds external firewire cases for SATA drives.

[MisterRogers]

Well, Dr. a couple of things. First the drive itself is SATA, not ATA and thus rated at 150. Generally I agree with you that performance would not justify such an external case. But, the market is filled with hardware configurations that are designed/marketed because users want them for whatever reason. The first examle that comes to mind, is a WiFi 54G USB 1.1 dongle. The FW800/external SATA drive enclosure approach is desireable to me for other reasons apart from raw performance. I suspect it's just a matter of time before SATA drives are abundant enough to force engineerings hand.