SATA Vs. Raid for start up disk

[cantthinkofone]

I have a MDD dual 1.25 powermac. Would a sata drive be quicker or would a raid 0 be quicker? Right now I have a 5400 rpm IDE drive running 10.4. I have two 40GB hard-drives laying around I could use for the RAID.

My powermac G4 has sata via a sonnet sata card(buy one, it's verrry nice) FYI.

 

[666sheep]

2x 5400 rpm IDE drives in RAID 0 will be always slower than decent SATA drive connected to Sonnet card.
If you want RAID, best solution will be adding second SATA HDD to your Sonnett setup and RAID 0 them. Obviously backup will be needed.

 

[cantthinkofone]

I bought the sata card so I could use a larger size drive for my media. It's worked out great but I'm thinking a quicker boot drive would pep this computer up.

 

[666sheep]

Single 5400 boot drive will surely slower than 7200 one. If you want costless solution, try this 5400 HDD based RAID 0. It only needs some cloning job and will cost you only some time and you'll see is it much better (or not) than previous HDD.
If money not matters - get SSD instead RAID

 

[cantthinkofone]

Single 5400 boot drive will surely slower than 7200 one. If you want costless solution, try this 5400 HDD based RAID 0. It only needs some cloning job and will cost you only some time and you'll see is it much better (or not) than previous HDD.
If money not matters - get SSD instead RAID

I tried setting up a RAID a few days ago but OS X would not recognize the drives. The jumper settings need to be master and slave correct?

 

[666sheep]

Cable select works too (on both HDDs that same OFC). Do you connect drives on faster (ATA100) channel?

 

[zen.state]

I tried setting up a RAID a few days ago but OS X would not recognize the drives. The jumper settings need to be master and slave correct?

It seems like you do not have much RAID experience. If that is the case then I highly recommend not booting from one or putting any important data on one without a backup.

I boot from a Western Digital Caviar Black SATA HD with a 64 MB buffer. Very fast and I definitely noticed a speed boost in app launching and file read/writes. The Caviar Black are the undisputed fastest 7200RPM drive on the planet. I highly recommend one. They also normally only sell for about $10 more than the standard consumer drives of the same size.

FYI: Sonnet gets FirmTek to make their SATA cards and from experience I can say they are the absolute best out there. Good investment. The 5.1.3 version of the firmware is recommended for G4 towers. With that firmware even sleep will work fine. Check what it currently has in system profiler.

 

[cantthinkofone]

It seems like you do not have much RAID experience. If that is the case then I highly recommend not booting from one or putting any important data on one without a backup.

I boot from a Western Digital Caviar Black SATA HD with a 64 MB buffer. Very fast and I definitely noticed a speed boost in app launching and file read/writes. The Caviar Black are the undisputed fastest 7200RPM drive on the planet. I highly recommend one. They also normally only sell for about $10 more than the standard consumer drives of the same size.

FYI: Sonnet gets FirmTek to make their SATA cards and from experience I can say they are the absolute best out there. Good investment. The 5.1.3 version of the firmware is recommended for G4 towers. With that firmware even sleep will work fine. Check what it currently has in system profiler.

Correct, I do not have much experience. I did get it to work, and made a clone of my drive before I created the RAID. Seems a little quicker.

Handbrake rips at about 7.5FPS if I don't have Safari open. I keep all my important stuff on other drives. And have copies of everything on all three drives that are in my computer. I need to burn some stuff to DVDs.

 

[zen.state]

Correct, I do not have much experience. I did get it to work, and made a clone of my drive before I created the RAID. Seems a little quicker.

Handbrake rips at about 7.5FPS if I don't have Safari open. I keep all my important stuff on other drives. And have copies of everything on all three drives that are in my computer. I need to burn some stuff to DVDs.

Question.. you hint at thinking that a faster drive will speed up handbrake ripping. Is that the case?

That will not help at all. Ripping is all about the CPU. The fastest drive on earth won't speed up that type of ripping at all. A 10 year old 4200rpm drive is plenty fast for that.

About your firmware version. You have 5.3.1 and that is the worst version to run on G4 towers. 5.1.3 is highly recommended for G4 towers. You can verify that by emailing their support staff. 5.3.1 is intended more for G5 towers with standard PCI but because it's the newest version it comes as the default on their cards. I was told to downgrade when I had sleep and other issues.

Here is a link to the better firmware: http://www.firmtek.com/download/SeriTek1S2_513.zip

 

[cantthinkofone]

Question.. you hint at thinking that a faster drive will speed up handbrake ripping. Is that the case?

That will not help at all. Ripping is all about the CPU. The fastest drive on earth won't speed up that type of ripping at all. A 10 year old 4200rpm drive is plenty fast for that.

About your firmware version. You have 5.3.1 and that is the worst version to run on G4 towers. 5.1.3 is highly recommended for G4 towers. You can verify that by emailing their support staff. 5.3.1 is intended more for G5 towers with standard PCI but because it's the newest version it comes as the default on their cards. I was told to downgrade when I had sleep and other issues.

Here is a link to the better firmware: http://www.firmtek.com/download/SeriTek1S2_513.zip

Right I understand that part. Why I said I miss the C2D I had In my other post about speeding up a G4. Wish I had a I7

I haven't really had any problems with the SATA card. I'm doing handbrake rips right now or I would down grade the card.