ATA/100 vs ATA/300

[jessica.]

I need a new external harddrive. There is a Seagate ST3500841A-RK 500GB RTL Ultra DMA/100 HDD ATA/100 and a Maxtor 500GB SATAII ATA/300. I have a powerbook g4 that'll it needs to plug into with FW 400 (I have the external drive enclosure).
Can I even run a SATAII? Or will it run, but just at a SATA speed?

[Sun Baked]

Those are two different drive interfaces there on those drives.

Check to see what type of enclosure you have, if it is ATA then the SATA (serial ata) drive won't work with it.

Problem is with the really old FW400 ATA enclosures, they may limit you to a 127GB drive.

[ReanimationLP]

Nah, you wont really notice a difference, since FW400 tops out at 50MB/s.

The Serial ATA drive tops out at 300MB/s transfer, and the ATA/100 tops out at 100MB/s.

[CanadaRAM]

Make sure you buy the correct interface for your enclosure.

Also, your existing enclosure may or may not have a suffiecient power supply to run drives > 200 GB

When buying hard drives, be sure that it is new and covered by the full manufacturers warranty. Get this in writing. You don't want a 'pull', OEM, re-certified or gray market drive that has zero - 1 year warranty.