Drive Storage Question

[robertdsc]

After following Cox Orange's advice on buying a PC SATA card with the SIL3124 chip, installing the drivers, installing two SATA drives and seeing them appear on the desktop of two separate G4 Macs, I have a question on what kind of drives to use.

The card I bought is a 4-port PCI-X card and works in a MDD Dual 1.0 and a DA 466. With that said, the possibilities are endless in terms of building a storage server, which is what my DA 466 was doing with many IDE drives.

My question is this: would it be better to buy standard 3.5 inch desktop hard drives or buy 2.5 inch laptop drives for my storage needs? I ask because I have a couple of people in my neck of the woods who could provide drives of either type.

I have lots of experience in mounting drives inside Mac cases, so getting laptop drives would not be a problem in terms of getting them to fit. If anyone can shed light on which kind of drive is better, I'd appreciate it.

 

[eyoungren]

After following Cox Orange's advice on buying a PC SATA card with the SIL3124 chip, installing the drivers, installing two SATA drives and seeing them appear on the desktop of two separate G4 Macs, I have a question on what kind of drives to use.

The card I bought is a 4-port PCI-X card and works in a MDD Dual 1.0 and a DA 466. With that said, the possibilities are endless in terms of building a storage server, which is what my DA 466 was doing with many IDE drives.

My question is this: would it be better to buy standard 3.5 inch desktop hard drives or buy 2.5 inch laptop drives for my storage needs? I ask because I have a couple of people in my neck of the woods who could provide drives of either type.

I have lots of experience in mounting drives inside Mac cases, so getting laptop drives would not be a problem in terms of getting them to fit. If anyone can shed light on which kind of drive is better, I'd appreciate it.

I don't have any hard numbers to give you, just an opinion based on my own experiences.

That said, I would say go with desktop drives. Between all the failed drives that I have had or experienced in the last ten years by far the greater amount is laptop drives. I can see that they would be easier to replace and a smaller form factor, but I don't think they last as long. I've still got desktop drives from the 90s that work.

I'm not sure about the ports either. I know that an IDE/PATA laptop drive port is very different from that of a desktop IDE/PATA port. You can't use a desktop IDE cable with a laptop IDE drive. I've never replaced a laptop SATA drive so I may be wrong, but I assume the port is different and that therefore you wouldn't be able to use the standard power and data cables.

Just my opinion.

 

[Intell]

You can use a 2.5" SATA drive in a desktop's SATA port without a problem. They have the same data and power connectors.