The G5s are designed for SATA hard drives; there is no ATA/100 or ATA/133 controller in the machine. There is an ATA/33 controller for the CD/DVD drive, and while you could theoretically connect a hard drive to it, it would be pretty slow, it wouldn't support anything larger than 120GB, and you'd have some major cable reworking to do.
You could run PATA drives via a PCI controller, but you'd have to improvise mouting the drive (while tapping power off the optical bay). BUT, if you've got a new PCI-Express based machine, I think you're SOL. AFAIK, there are no Mac-compatible PCIe ATA controller cards (yet).
Some PATA-SATA adapter dongles will work in a G5 (many wont). Check with the manufacturer. But do be aware that officially these are not supported by Apple.
An external FireWire case will likely be your best option. And for a single drive, FW400 should provide plenty of bandwidth. For a two or more drive array, FW800 would handle it just fine.
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