G5 question for Garyi (and others)

Hopefully, more PC motherboards will include FireWire as standard - certainly the more pricier ones do at the moment. It's handy both for DV cams and also attaching high-speed external storage, although USB 2.0 is taking over on the storage side of things. Some soundcards, such as the Creative SoundBlaster Audigy / Audigy 2 cards, include a FireWire interface.

P-ATA is pretty damn fast - I'm using a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160GB 8MB buffer hard drive in my PC and can boot from power on to Windows XP desktop in around 25 - 30 secs. Certainly good enough for me.

Haven't tried S-ATA, as I'd need to buy an add-on card and the drives were more expensive when buying a new drive recently. The benchmarks I've seen haven't shown major benefits.

Note that this is on the PC platform using Windows XP - it may well be very different on Mac.

 

i'd use firewire for external storage if at all possible usb2 is fast but requires a lot more (about 75% more iirc) processor usage to maintain the connection to the hardware.
i'm looking for a larger hard drive to put into an old pc, this uses the standard hd connector ida/ata i believe - i've seen drives sedcribed as udma and sata can i use these or do i require an extra card. (if i do i'll just get a firewire card and external storage as this will be much easier to expand when i need to - but internal drives are much cheaper which is good at the mo).
cheers


julian

 

If it uses the standard 40 pin IDE connector then its an IDE/UDMA drive you want (S-ATA uses a different much smaller and flimsier connector).

Depending on the size of the drive you want to use and the age of the PC, you may need an additional controller card. Older PCs won't recognise very large drives, depending on the age of the PC you may find the maximum size of drive it will see is 8.4GB, 32GB, or 137GB.

To get around these limitations, there are things like BIOS updates and software packages from drive manufacturers, but a controller card is only £15 or so these days and will allow you to use much larger hard drives, and give you the possibility for an extra 4 drives (presuming you get the typical 2 IDE port controller card, thats 2 channels, each which will support a master and a slave drive).

 

some benchmark tests for all 3 G5s and some dual G4s:
http://www.barefeats.com/g5.html

and yeah, G4s are pretty loud.

 

thanks for the info mate, i've been googleing my pants off this week

My shiny new G5 1.6 should be with me inside of a fortnight going to cost me £1550 over the course of three years, but the chances are that it'll still be seeing extended daily use by then are rather good. the PC's going to feel awfully jelous

 

Nice Mike!

I also need a MAC since I gave mine to my wife a few months ago. I am waiting for the new ones with the 90 nm process size.
It seems that now IBM got handle on the problems with the chip yields.

Maybe for WWDC the new macs will be anounced.