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SATA in a G4 tower, worth it?

Submitted by Hawaii Cruiser on September 11, 2007 - 9:06am. PowerPC Macs

Is it worth the time and money adding an SATA PCI card with SATA hard drives to a G4 tower? I've got my wife's 867mhz G4 Quicksilver setup with an ATA133 card and matching hard drives. She does some light video work. Would she see significant speed and performance increases switching to SATA, or all the bottlenecks involved in the G4 going to make the benefits negligible? There was some mention of the issue as this thread progressed, but I got pretty lost in the complex discussion. Is there a simple answer? Thanks

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If you already have ATA133 dr

Submitted by Maccess on September 11, 2007 - 1:21pm.

If you already have ATA133 drives, you'll see little improvement with SATA.

I'd say shift to SATA only if you'll be buying new drives.

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coius's picture

Speed?

Submitted by coius on September 12, 2007 - 12:00pm.

What speed is the G4 tower. I would say, you would see more of an increase in performance on faster towers. ones that have like ATA/66 or so. But if you are doing it on a ATA/33, you will only notice a slight increase. I have a Blue & White G4, and I don't see too much of an increase anymore. Not since I have gotten used to the faster Harddrive in my iBook (soon to be MacBook). I guess I just don't notice it anymore...

I would recommend that you have an SATA Drive in it. Not an ATA/133 -> SATA adapter. the adapter just slows things down and are unreliable too.

I have gone through 2 of the adapters. Different manufacturers, but it seems they die easily. So do yourself a favor, get an actual SATA Drive. I picked up an 80GB SATA 3.0 Drive for like $40 (w/ $5 shipping)

Anyways, I should do more benchmarking and see if I can get my G4 working better and faster

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