baggss said:
From browsing hard drives yesterday it appears that what is needed is Serial SATA, not plain SATA. Serial uses the new interface
(Small Cable) vice the standards SATA IDE interface (ribbon cable). I realize calling it Serial SATA is sort of a misnomer, but that is how the HDD boxes are labled. The standard SATA boxes show the IDE interface.
Hey Baggss-
Here's what happened and what I learned.
Mac Connection is sending me two Maxtor, SATA 1.5 Gbps, 300 GB drives to replace the two Western Digital, SATA 3.0 Gbps, 120 GB drives that wouldn't connect. When I ordered the WDs I was looking for speed, not capacity, but I'll settle to get this beautiful thing running.
When you go to make a purchase, remember one thing, G5s require blade, not pin connectors.
Someone said that I needed SATA drives, not IDE drives. SATA drives are IDE drives. IDE is the name for the interface... "Usually, these devices connect to the computer through an Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. Essentially, an IDE interface is a standard way for a storage device to connect to a computer. IDE is actually not the true technical name for the interface standard. The original name, AT Attachment (ATA), signified that the interface was initially developed for the IBM AT computer."
SATA means Serial ATA. It is now the industry-standard storage interface, replacing the Parallel ATA interface... "Designed to keep pace with the demands of digital video creation and editing, audio storage and playback, and other data-intensive applications, Serial ATA supports 1.5-Gbps throughput per channel (equivalent to a data rate of 150 MBps).
The drives I wanted were SATA 3.0 Gbps. This is often called SATA II, but "II" really indicates the name of the committee/organization formed to author the SATA specifications. The SATA 3.0 drives would have had nearly twice the transfer rate of Apple's SATA 1.5 Gbps stock drive. SATA 3.0 drives are backward compatible, so they will replace Apple's stock drives, using the same interface connectors. The "controllers" are on the drives and the motherboard and System X (maybe only 10.4?) will recognize them. The Power Mac G5 can hold two internal 500GB Serial ATA drives for a total capacity of 1TB of storage.
Another important thing is the size of the drives Buffer. Most SATA drives have an 8 MB buffer, but the latest drives have 16 MB and are able to read/write faster.
So, I would look for 3.5" SATA 3.0 Gbps drives, with a 16 MB cache and spade type connectors. I know they are out there, I just didn't want to wait to find them.
Here's some reading that helped me. See what it says to you.
http://www.serialata.org/
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Sep/bch20030922021866.htm
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm