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IDE HD in a G5

K

kenyabob

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 13, 2003
127
0
San Francisco
I bought a Maxtor IDE 160 gb HD, I also bought a Powermac G5. The G5 uses a serial connection, not an HD, but I think the Superdrive must use a IDE. Is there any way to connect the IDE HD without sacrificing the performance of the Superdrive?
 
S-ATA is 150MBs; the fastest IDE/ATA goes is 133MBs. Also, where the two S-ATA drives can go use a connector that is similar to SCA on some SCSI drives. This puts the power and the bus on one connector. Where did you plan on putting this other drive?
 
Im not sure, I was going to place the HD in an available slot, maybe where the second S-ATA was going to go... is any of this possible?
 
Probably is possible, but I'd be amazed if the IDE cable to the superdrive will reach. You'll likely need a PCI IDE adapter, and I'm not sure how cable routing is going to work.
 
well technically you can do this, cable lenght is the problem. for your hard drive to fit with the superdrive, it would need to be right below the superdrive, which wont be possible because of space. if i were you i would just buy yourself a controller card and put it in the pci slot, or better yet just buy a fw800 enclosure case and slap it in there, fw800 can handle the speed of ata 133.

iJon
 
Do you know any good sites that have affordable products/quality for these enclosures, I think that it might be the best way to go. Is installation easy?
 
hell anyone of them wil do. firewiredepot is a good place to start. installation is easy. just open it up, plug in the ide and power and close it back up. i would highly recommend getting a case with a fw800 port. they are new and more expensive, but it will be faster.

iJon
 
Originally posted by kenyabob
and what about usb 2.0?
Click to expand...

it's half the speed, can't have nearly as long cable lenghts, it can support host powering, but in most cases, thats non existent, and you'd probably want to save your usb ports for other stuff since most everything is usb, but hardly anything is fw800, so you wouldn't need to worry about that with fw
 
well you cna get that but i dont see why. fw400 and 800 are both faster than usb 2.0, but whatever floats your boat.

iJon
 
Re: USB 2.0 over FW800 :(

You can also pound a nail into your head if you feel like it, but why would you?

Or you can look at Barefeats Faceoff, and see how some of the interfaces stack up to each other.

Even the stuff at Tom's Hardware shows FW400 beating USB 2.0 in the dual port devices.
 
Yes you can, but it will be at ATA33, so there will be a slight performance hit (about the same speed as a firewire drive)
 
You don't need a PCI card or a FW800/400 case. There are adapters available...

Here's one...

http://www.thechipmerchant.com/41593-0.html

It's $28 however you don't need any external boxes or anything taking up your PCI slots (even though you might not fill them up anyway... but why take the chance right?).

If I were you I'd run my system off the Stock serialATA drive but put all your files on this one.
 
OWC has some good combination FW400/USB 2.0 external drive enclosures. That way it's portable, and you can always stick in another internal serial drive later. FW800 is nice, but it's more ex*****ive, and real world tests don't show it to be much faster than 400.

Both are much faster than USB 2, but you can use it to transfer files to other computers if need be. USB 2 is backwards compatible with USB 1.1.

Or use a Serial converter as already suggested to make it internal. You may need a 4-pin power cable splitter to go from the Superdrive. I wouldn't recommend hooking it up to the IDE cable the CD drive is on. The hard drive would be slower, and may get stuck at the 137 GB limit of older IDE.

Don't bother with an IDE PCI card. It's not worth it.
 
Originally posted by Royal Pineapple
are there any cables in the g5?
i dont think cable length is gonna be your real problem with making it internal, just looking at the pics i dont see any cables coming out of the superdrive so im not to sure how this is gonna work, personally id find a good FW800 case and slap it in there
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by solvs
Both are much faster than USB 2
Click to expand...

How is Firewire (400Mbit/s) much faster than USB 2 (480Mbit/s)? The raw numbers probably don't say everything, but I would expect them to be about equally fast.
 
Originally posted by reflex
How is Firewire (400Mbit/s) much faster than USB 2 (480Mbit/s)? The raw numbers probably don't say everything, but I would expect them to be about equally fast.
Click to expand...

In real world tests, FW blows USB away. Do a search for it. The info is all over the place. Numbers like that mean nothing, especially when it comes to things like drives that can barely reach 50MB/s (400Mb/s) in real world speeds.

These are maximum numbers we're talking about, and that's a whole nother issue.
 
I don't know how much space there is in the drive bay, but you can get SATA -> PATA converters to allow you to use your old drives with new controllers. There is not really any performance hit as there is not a single drive on the planet (not event 15k RPM SCSI) that can sustain 133MB/s let alone 150. If there is space this would probably be the neatest, cheapest and probably best solution.

Edit:

Thought I'd link to the correct sort of thing:http://www.highpoint-tech.com/rh.htm You can get these for less than £10 in the UK!
 
Re: Re: USB 2.0 over FW800 :(

Originally posted by Sun Baked
You can also pound a nail into your head if you feel like it, but why would you?

Or you can look at Barefeats Faceoff, and see how some of the interfaces stack up to each other.

Even the stuff at Tom's Hardware shows FW400 beating USB 2.0 in the dual port devices.
Click to expand...

Do you have the link to the pages showing the FW400 beating USB 2.0?
 
It seems that there arent any FW800 devices under 100 dollars, or even near that price. It seems quite economically unwise to purchase a case that is more than the hd. I can get a reasonable 60 dollar FW400/USB2.0 case of a similar build.
 
The thing I'm still curious to see is how someone is actually going to route IDE or SCSI cables up to those drive bays, even from a PCI card thats right there. The pictures don't make it look easy.
 
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