New Hard Drive for PMG4

[BeeHive]

Hey All,

I am interested in upgrading my hard drive on the quicksilver. I currently have a stock 80 GB that is in the process of failing. Is it worth going SATA, or is the performance bump negligible because of the bus speed? Also, If I were to get an SSD (for noise purposes) should I upgrade to SATA? I don't want to shell out too much for a SATA card, so that is why I was wondering if I should stay with IDE. Any thoughts?

P.S. I won't need more than 500 GB

 

[eyoungren]

Hey All,

I am interested in upgrading my hard drive on the quicksilver. I currently have a stock 80 GB that is in the process of failing. Is it worth going SATA, or is the performance bump negligible because of the bus speed? Also, If I were to get an SSD (for noise purposes) should I upgrade to SATA? I don't want to shell out too much for a SATA card, so that is why I was wondering if I should stay with IDE. Any thoughts?

P.S. I won't need more than 500 GB

I have two 150GB IDE drives on my Quicksilver. I RAIDED them, but they are not my startup volume.

I would go SATA. I've found that it's actually faster in my system than the IDE bus. Perhaps that's because I've RAIDED those drives, but in any case SATA is still faster than Firewire 400.

If you go the SSD route you'll probably want to go SATA anyway as PATA (IDE) SSDs are very hard to find, less capacity and more expensive.

You can get a decent PC SATA card for $10 and flash it to Mac. It's very easy, I did it, and you'll save yourself about $60-70. Including the cabling (molex to SATA power splitter and SATA data cables) it's really economical.

Here's the instructions I followed. It's dead simple if you get the kind of card recommended. The bonus is that you can still keep your IDE drives (or not) if you wish. Doing this gave me 4 drives in my system.

 

[BeeHive]

I have two 150GB IDE drives on my Quicksilver. I RAIDED them, but they are not my startup volume.

I would go SATA. I've found that it's actually faster in my system than the IDE bus. Perhaps that's because I've RAIDED those drives, but in any case SATA is still faster than Firewire 400.

If you go the SSD route you'll probably want to go SATA anyway as PATA (IDE) SSDs are very hard to find, less capacity and more expensive.

You can get a decent PC SATA card for $10 and flash it to Mac. It's very easy, I did it, and you'll save yourself about $60-70. Including the cabling (molex to SATA power splitter and SATA data cables) it's really economical.

Here's the instructions I followed. It's dead simple if you get the kind of card recommended. The bonus is that you can still keep your IDE drives (or not) if you wish. Doing this gave me 4 drives in my system.

Thanks for the link- unfortunately, I do not have access to a PC to flash the card. I think I will stick with IDE and just try to find a quiet (ish) drive, since the speed I'm running at is fine right now.

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks for the link- unfortunately, I do not have access to a PC to flash the card. I think I will stick with IDE and just try to find a quiet (ish) drive, since the speed I'm running at is fine right now.

OK. About a year ago the ancient and original 20GB drive on one of our G4s here at work finally died. We replaced it with a 120GB refurb from NewEgg. You might look there. It cost my boss all of $20 including shipping.

 

[BeeHive]

OK. About a year ago the ancient and original 20GB drive on one of our G4s here at work finally died. We replaced it with a 120GB refurb from NewEgg. You might look there. It cost my boss all of $20 including shipping.

Thanks man, I'll look into it. I was checking the prices for Leopard, and they are pretty expensive. Will Leopard become more or less expensive with time, ya think?

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks man, I'll look into it. I was checking the prices for Leopard, and they are pretty expensive. Will Leopard become more or less expensive with time, ya think?

My guess is that it will become more expensive. There are less and less copies out there and those that own a legit copy know the value of what they have. Being the last version of OS X and all.

Tiger and Panther are less popular because the machines they work on are (in general) lower specced and thus by definition less capable than machines running Leopard. Therefore there's less demand for those versions. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I think that's probably the judgement on those Macs.

So my point is that Leopard is a valuable commodity now. Because of that I don't see the prices coming down until PowerPC hits the final wall that kills it. Then it just becomes something that gets dumped on the internet, or released to the public domain like System 7.5 and below.

 

[Bug-Creator]

Thanks for the link- unfortunately, I do not have access to a PC to flash the card. I think I will stick with IDE and just try to find a quiet (ish) drive, since the speed I'm running at is fine right now.

You could still buy and IDE-SATA adaptor ....

And if "cheap" and "silent" are so important, go with some older 2.5" (instead of a SSD).

 

[RedCroissant]

Hey All,

I am interested in upgrading my hard drive on the quicksilver. I currently have a stock 80 GB that is in the process of failing. Is it worth going SATA, or is the performance bump negligible because of the bus speed? Also, If I were to get an SSD (for noise purposes) should I upgrade to SATA? I don't want to shell out too much for a SATA card, so that is why I was wondering if I should stay with IDE. Any thoughts?

P.S. I won't need more than 500 GB

Thanks man, I'll look into it. I was checking the prices for Leopard, and they are pretty expensive. Will Leopard become more or less expensive with time, ya think?

Hey Beehive,

Today "might" be your lucky day. I have doing a purge of my stuff and I just happen to have a 200GB IDE HDD that is not being used at all right now because I don't have a machine that could use it and I don;t see myself getting one in the future that will.

I also have a Leopard 10.5.1 Family Pack installation DVD that I would consider parting with depending on what you'd be willing to offer.

Let me know if you're interested and we can go from there.


Hey Erik,

I've been getting nothing but spam/scam again for the PPC Macs, so if you still want the 20"iMac, it's yours. Let me know when you can come by and pick it up and we can also go from there. I'll be including the black Apple Pro keyboard/mouse set as well with it. Just let me know!

 

[eyoungren]

Hey Erik,

I've been getting nothing but spam/scam again for the PPC Macs, so if you still want the 20"iMac, it's yours. Let me know when you can come by and pick it up and we can also go from there. I'll be including the black Apple Pro keyboard/mouse set as well with it. Just let me know!

I texted you. Thanks Ryan!