[Meadowfield]

Thanks to your help about two years ago I successfully popped a second drive into my G4. It was a IDE Seagate and I was surprised how easy it was. I plan to do the same on my G5 but understand that that I now have to choose an ATA drive. What exactly is the difference anyway? And, why can't I find a Seagate ATA? Office Depot has Maxor ATA's and so does Circuit City. In fact they have ATA/100's and ATA/150's. The Circuit City dude couldn't tell me the difference and I am afraid I must ask for your assistance once again.

Thanks in advance.

[bowwowman]

Actually, you need an SATA (as in SERIAL ATA) drive 4 a G5, not regular ATA
They are just recently becoming available at retail stores, but can be found much, much cheaper online......

[Big Mac]

SATA is a new standard, not to be confused with the previous type of ATA (IDE) that is now renamed ex post facto PATA (parallel ATA). There are Seagate brand SATA drives, but certain brands may only be available at certain retail establishments.

[d.fine]

It's a different way to connect the HD. SATA is a little faster than the previous gen on HD's. It is very easy to install in your G5's, just a matter of seconds. Also with SATA drives there are no Master/Slave settings so you can just pop it in there without worries.

[Meadowfield]

Thanks once again, gentlemen. You're the best.

[Kristoff]

"SATA is a little faster than the previous..."

Understatement....have you used a WD Raptor?

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by Kristoff

"SATA is a little faster than the previous..."

Understatement....have you used a WD Raptor?

It's not an understatement, coz you'd compare a 10k drive with a 7.2k drive. There is no ATA100 version of the raptor, but drives which are sold with both connectors are about as fast as the other.

[Kristoff]

The Raptor has 1,200 Mbits/s (150 Mbytes/s) max buffer to host throughput which eclipses the theoretical 100 Mbyte/s limit of ATA100 and the 133Mbyte/s limit of ATA133.

So, it would be impossible to make an ATA100 version of the Raptor.

[OreoCookie]

It wouldn't be impossible, and in most applications, this wouldn't really make much of a difference. The actual disk speed (without the buffer) can be accommodated within the regular ATA133 bandwidth, even ATA100.

[Kristoff]

You haven't used them, so you are "magazine racing."

I have a system with two raptors, and they are much faster than the stock SATA drives even.

[OreoCookie]

Yes, but that says very little about a fictitious ATA133 version. At university, most equipment is more old-school, so mostly Sun boxes with 10k SCSI drives. To put another way, the Raptor is fast, because it is a 10k drive and built to perform similar to a SCSI 10k drive, I never claimed otherwise. To quote the buffer speed is certainly not enough to conclude a serious speed penalty if the bus speed is lowered by 17 MB/s.

[Kristoff]

That's a joke, right?

17MB/s is substantial--even if it represents busts from the buffer.
The Raptor doesn't saturate the SATA bus, so the point is there is potential for growth.
You will see very fast SATA drives in the not too distant future.

The fact that most of the manufacturers are merely bridging their old stock 7,200 RPM drives doesn't make the original statement accurate, per se.

Technically, you are right. What you can get off the shelf at Staples isn't indicative of SATA performance potential, and thereby marginally faster than ATA.

And, I am right, because a high speed SATA drive that implements the protocol natively will kick the crap out of the fastest ATA drives.

And, the Raptor actually uses an older WD controller, and a SATA bridge chip. But, the reason they only offer SATA versions is due to the fact that the burst transfer rate is too fast for ATA100 and ATA133, so there's no point making an ATA Raptor.

[thetman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ogy_Attachment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by Kristoff

That's a joke, right?

17MB/s is substantial--even if it represents busts from the buffer.
The Raptor doesn't saturate the SATA bus, so the point is there is potential for growth.
You will see very fast SATA drives in the not too distant future.

...

And, the Raptor actually uses an older WD controller, and a SATA bridge chip. But, the reason they only offer SATA versions is due to the fact that the burst transfer rate is too fast for ATA100 and ATA133, so there's no point making an ATA Raptor.

This is exactly what I'm trying to say here. I don't talk about future drives or the potential, I talk about the drives that are available today. (The latest Raptor maxes out at 72-73 MB/s [url=http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20040123/wd740-07.html]as you can see here, which is well within what can be accomodated with PATA.)

Making an ATA raptor would be technically trivial, but not very useful. It doesn't have anything to do with the burst rate, but with other technologies such as NCQ (native command queueing) and genuine hot-plugging which are not supported by PATA as well as the fact that taking the fastest connection for such a drive makes sense.

[phantomac]

Actually, you should be able to connect an ATA-drive to the G5 by simply using an ATA-cable that spots three connectors instead of the two-connector one used by the optical drive as one ATA-bus can handle two drives. Currently only the optical drive is connected to the ATA-bus, so you can add another drive to that bus easily.

You'd need a Y-power cable, too, as there's only one power connector available and that goes to the optical drive.

[Kristoff]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/.../wd740-07.html

Wow, those graphs sure seem to support my argument, that the Raptor is notably faster than the fastest 7200.7.

[OreoCookie]

Again, I never questioned that.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Kristoff

Wow, those graphs sure seem to support my argument, that the Raptor is notably faster than the fastest 7200.7.

Nobody ever questioned that. The point is that the Raptor's speed doesn't come from its being SATA, but from it just being a faster drive.

In all drive models that exist with both regular and SATA interfaces (e.g. the 7200.7 series), there is no large difference in speed between interfaces, because the interface is not the bottleneck.

tooki

[Squozen]

It's quite possible to plug a Raptor into an IDE channel using an adapter, and that proves that the interface is not the bottleneck (I use a Raptor on one of my PCs).

[OreoCookie]

My points exactly.

[MikeD]

I was looking at education pricing on these drives with apple and noted that it was 180 for the one 400gb drive but if I wanted two, the price jumped to 600 something!! Is this right? Would I be better off getting just the one as an upgrade and then buying a SATA drive off the internet? The new PM G5's only have two slots unlike my MDD now which has I think 4 slots...

Mike

[Waragainstsleep]

OK....

You can quote stats all day, but SATA drives are much faster than ATA. I reckon its a big factor in the speed difference between the G4 and G5 (iMacs and PowerMacs), both during general use and during startup.

ATA is the same as IDE only faster. IDE was the first version, then various different marks of ATA followed. There seems to be numerous naming systems for them all too. IDE was 16MB/s if recall right, then ATA33 was 33MB/s, then there was ATA66, ATA100, ATA133, and maybe even ATA166. Perhaps it was 150. I'm sure you've gather the number is the speed in MB/s. These are most likely the theoretical limits, and the bottleneck is probably somehwere else in the line between drive and logic board. They are also known as ATA1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 I think. There are probably other naming systems too. They don't really make alot of real world difference. Most of them are backwards compatible. (The drives and the busses)

Anyway, you can fit an ATA drive in a G5, since it has an ATA bus which is what the optical drive runs on. Its a dual channel bus, but only one is actually used. You have to be prepared to do some serious fiddling though....

http://www.macmod.com/content/view/201/2/

If you get the bug for fiddling, perhaps you could try something like this one:

http://www.macmod.com/content/view/171/2/

[Kristoff]

Originally Posted by Squozen

It's quite possible to plug a Raptor into an IDE channel using an adapter, and that proves that the interface is not the bottleneck (I use a Raptor on one of my PCs).

That doesn't prove anything at all other than your lack of understanding of the technologies involved. There is error control in the protocols involved. What do you think happens if the bus is not ready--is the drive going to explode? What happens is that if you hook it to a slow bus via adapters, you just cause the drive to idle and re-queue data due to the bus not being ready thereby diminishing the drive's performance.

[OreoCookie]

Excuse me, I think you should be more careful when telling others they don't know nothing about this or that. Most of the comments about the Raptor that were made by others were actually quite intelligible, but you seem to insist that it's the interface. Your insistance that 17 MB/s less in bandwidth are going to make a world of difference, even though the Raptor's internal bandwidth tops out at 106 MB/s (old) and 115 MB/s, respectively, shows that you should question your knowledge of the underlying technologies.

[Scotttheking]

Originally Posted by MikeD

I was looking at education pricing on these drives with apple and noted that it was 180 for the one 400gb drive but if I wanted two, the price jumped to 600 something!! Is this right? Would I be better off getting just the one as an upgrade and then buying a SATA drive off the internet? The new PM G5's only have two slots unlike my MDD now which has I think 4 slots...

Mike

Either buy one from Apple and the other as an upgrade, or buy the smallest from Apple and get 2 from somewhere else. 300GB are a fair bit cheaper, IIRC, incase you don't need the biggest drives.

[bowwowman]

Well, for those of you who question the ifs, hows & whys of Raptor's spppeeeeed, for whatever reason, I've got news for yas......

they S*C*R*E*A*M*..........NO 2 ways about it!!!!!

I just added one to my smurf box, along with a Firmtek pci controller, and it whips the electrons off of my other Maxtor & Seagate SATA 7200prm drives.

Results:

Boot times are way, way, way faster.... I BARELY see the splash screen or the boot panel now, but when booting from the Maxtor or the Seagate, I have to watch the little blue progress bar til the end.......

The desktop appeared so quickly the first time I booted from the Raptor, I thought something was wrong

Launching 3 applications from start-up items (time until all 3 apps are ready to use:

Raptor = "Blink fool, i'm ready to work"

same as above with all 15 apps in my dock, also considerably faster

Open Photoshop.app AND a mega-GB/multi-layered image stored on each HD:

Raptor = 19.9s Maxtor/Seagate = 1.8 - 2.3min

Duplicating that monster image above: Raptor = 3.9s, other drives = 1min

All test were done with 100% fresh installs of Tiger on all drives, immediately upon rebooting, and all configs/settings identical

Now remember, this is on a 5 year old, otherwise maxed out smurf box, with a non-native SATA pci controller.....

regardless of how or why, the Raptor IS MUCHO faster than other 7200 rpm SATA drives

Just in case anyone was wondering

[Catfish_Man]

This is almost hilarious:

macnn: yes, 10k rpm drives are faster than 7200, but it's because they're 10k, not because they're SATA

a few people here: you guys are idiots, this drive is so much faster than 7200 rpm drives.