Drive Advice

[David Roth weiss]

Steve,

You might check out the stuff from G-Tech. I’m especially keen on their external G-SATA drives — faster and just a little more expensive than firewire drives, at just over a dollar per GB. The necessary SATA controller card will take up a precious PCI slot in your G5, but I think they chuck in the controller card for free with the drive. I’ve heard good things about them and am on the verge of buyong one or more myself.

DRW

[Mitchji]

Hi,

I think adaptors are available but I would just add either some external or internal (up to nine) SATA drives:
https://www.barefeats.com/quick.html
July 14th, 2005 — MaxUpgrades has released their MaXConnect kit that puts 9 drives total inside your G5 Power Mac. I had a chance to preview this product. It’s ingenious. I’ve heard from readers who put drives is in the optical bay of the G5, but their drives were just sitting there vibrating and heating up. MaxUpgrades has devised a mounting solution that keeps the drives from oscillating and allows air to move over and under each of the four drives. I mounted four drives in our G5 Power Mac test system. The drives ran at the same temperatures as the drives in the factory bay.

Cards to add external or internal SATA ports plus external enclosures:
https://www.barefeats.com/hard46.html

https://www.barefeats.com/hard45.html

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Glenn Chan]

Some more options:

A- You can get PATA to SATA adapters for the drives in your G4. You should be able to then install them into your G5 (which only takes serial ATA drives inside).
Example: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822998001 * may need the SATA power adapter too.

B- You could boot up your G4 as a firewire drive, and hook it up to your G5. You need to hold down a specify key during startup… you should be able to google this.

C- You could stick the G4 drives in external enclosures, although this is probably not a good idea because there’s limits to how many firewire devices you can have on one bus without problems.

D- You could also install more SATA drives into your G5. IIRC the G5 is limited to 2 drives unless you add a 3rd-party “hack” like the G5 Jam.
400GB SATA is about USD$258, lower capacities are better GB/$ (but can be more GB/$ when you run out of space, SATA controllers/ports, power).