08-02-2009, 11:40 PM

If i buy an eSata card and external eSata Raid 0 drives? I know its a pretty dumb idea but those are the best ones. And if i ever upgrade to another Mac, i would still want to use the external eSata drive as a boot drive as it will still be faster than the internal processor no matter which model, yes? At least it will be faster than my current dual 1.25ghz circa 2003.

Has anyone actually done this?

thanks, roger

08-03-2009, 01:28 AM

G'day and welcome to the Forums.

The only way you can boot from an external drive is by Firewire so don't spend your cash on eSATA. Pop an IDE HDD into an external Firewire case, connect to your G4 using the Firewire cable, go into Disk utility and the external should appear in the left column.

Select it, and hit 'Partition' and partition the drive, one partition if you wish, back to Disk Utility, select again and format Mac OS Extended (Journalled). Backup using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and your external is a bootable drive.

The only PowerMacs that will boot from an external SATA drive are the late 2005 Dual Core PowerMacs connected to a SeriTek 2SE2 PCIE controller card. Believe me from experience that is a pretty dear way too!

08-03-2009, 01:54 AM

thanks. you think an external FW drive will be any faster than the internal one which is a Seagate 160GB 7200? External Raid 0 FW? If there's a chance i should go with FW, is there a disk speed unility that you can recommend?

08-03-2009, 07:04 AM

1. Changing your hard drives have nothing (zero) to do with the processor. This will not, I repeat, will not speed up the processor in your computer.

2. Quote from Bare Feats after testing of 3 firewire Raid systems

Now for a little perspective. Not only are FireWire drives slower than the same drive on an Ultra ATA interface, but FireWire RAIDs are slower than Ultra ATA RAIDs. Yet if you want something external, portable, and hot-pluggable, they are definitely the way to go for auxillary storage.

Interpretation: Firewire drives are slower than the same drive attached to the Ultra ATA (or SATA for that matter) port inside your computer.

08-03-2009, 07:14 AM

Changing your hard drives have nothing (zero) to do with the processor.

I was actually hoping it would make my screen bigger too!

I was thinking along the lines that the hard drive in current computers is the bottleneck for transfer speeds but in the G4 it is probably the processor or more likely the bus sped which is 167 Mhz.

So without knowing the actual numbers for the hard drive read and write times of the current internal HD compared to an external FW 400 Raid 0 HD I assumed it was possible that an external might be faster!

How can i speed up this puppy? I know how to do it on a PC, but this is my first Mac.