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OldCorpse

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Dec 7, 2005
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I've bought several external IDE drives for my 1.33Ghz G4 iBook (see sig), and they've worked fine. My question is, what's the deal with SATA drives and iBooks? Can I use SATA drives as external HD to hook up to my iBook? Do I need some kind of special connectors? Or do I need to get a special enclosure and as long as the enclosure works with the SATA drive, I just hook up the iBook through FW or USB? I ask, as more and more, I find SATA drives are displacing IDE drives, and bargain IDEs are getting harder to find...
 

CanadaRAM

macrumors G5
OldCorpse said:
I've bought several external IDE drives for my 1.33Ghz G4 iBook (see sig), and they've worked fine. My question is, what's the deal with SATA drives and iBooks? Can I use SATA drives as external HD --- do I need to get a special enclosure and as long as the enclosure works with the SATA drive, I just hook up the iBook through FW or USB?

Yes.

(Don't'cha love it when members answer their own questions? ;) )

SATA - firewire cases are harder to find than IDE- Firewire cases. I recommend you look for 3.5" Drives and cases -- they perform better and are less expensive than 2.5" drives. Yes, you do have to plug them into the wall, but I don't like buss-powered hard drives in any case.

Don't bother with USB - Firewire is almost double the real-world speed, and is bootable on any Mac with Firewire.

SATA hard drives are a little more expensive than IDE yet.

Once it is behind the Firewire bridge, there is little or no speed benefit to go with SATA, because both are faster than Firewire can cope with.
 

OldCorpse

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Thanks, CanadaRAM, it was my intent all along to go with 3.5" drives. Actually, my recent experience has been that there are *better* deals (cheaper) on SATA drives than IDE (maybe a fluke, but it's been so for the past 2 months or so).

OK, so bottom line, my only worry is to find a good SATA/FW enclosure... and then just hook my iBook to it... cool, I'll look into that!
 
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