SATA External drives and G4 iBook

Thank you for your answers! After reviewing the options, it looks like I better stick with the IDE drives... sure, the SATA drives may be cheaper, but they get you on the enclosures if you want FW 😟

Oh well, such is the price of obsolescence 🙂

Thank you for that link.

Here's what I mean by "they get you":

the enclosure you linked to is $58.98 after discount. The shipping is $14.45 for a total of $74.43.

For comparison here's a link to an IDE Firewire and USB 2.0 enclosure:

http://store.4linkcomm.com/gax-3506c.html

Found it on dealmac.com - total price $24.00 with FREE shipping.

FURTHERMORE, if I am not mistaken, the Cooldrive drive you linked to has only one FW port, whereas the Galaxy Metal Gearbox I linked to has 2 FW ports - this means I can daisy chain the Galaxy, whereas I cannot do the same with the Cooldrive drive. For my needs, the Galaxy is the better product, quite apart from price, purely on technical merits (obviously, for someone who uses SATA drives in a SATA enabled computer, the opinion may be different).

Now, regarding cost, this is a $50 difference. I have found SATA hard drives to be cheaper than IDE drives, and more available. However, once you factor in the $50 difference in price the SATA package becomes VASTLY more expensive. After all, you can get a whole 400GB IDE drive for $70 - so $50 is not a trivial expense (and the 400GB is a late model Seagate 7200RPM with a 16MB cache).

So, how do they "get you" on the SATA FW enclosures? Well, the way they get you is that I can buy 3 IDE FW drives (which I can also daisychain) for only ONE SATA FW (which I cannot daisychain) - and still have money left over ($24x3=$72).

Again, I have searched for SATA enclosures with FW, and have found them to be extremely expensive - of course, it's possible that cheaper ones exist and I simply have not found them.

Before I posted my question, I did a search of the forum, the fora on other mac oriented sites, and a general google search - and frankly, I was surprised this exact topic (i.e. OEM SATA drives + enclosures hooked to G4 machines) hasn't really come up (there's a lot about internal SATA drives)... you'd think it would be a hot topic 🙂... BWDIK.

You are right, in that not all enclosures are made equal. For example, there are even cheaper FW+USB IDE enclosures, which I didn't mention, precisely because they can be suspect, f.ex. the Ultra for $19.99 - it has a Prolific chipset which sometimes gives you problems if you try to boot from it.

However, the Galaxy drive that I mentioned, is a solid enclosure - I have 3 of them, and have had them for a bit over 2 years now, working flawlessly. In general, the Metal Gear Box enclosures have a good reputation (as user feedback), so it's not just my anecdotal experience. The vast majority of users who put together their own HDD+enclosure solutions don't spend as much or more for the enclosure as for the HDD, and most of them have no problems. I think therefore that it's not necessary to pay $80 for an enclosure to get good quality - no doubt, some of the $80-and-up enclosures have features not found on the cheaper enclosures, but it's not a linear relationship (f.ex. the poor quality Ultra actually has a fan, while some expensive enclosures have poor user ratings). What is salient however, is that while IDE FW enclosures offer a range of price points, SATA FW enclosures do not, and I doubt it's because all the (expensive) SATA FW enclosures are good quality... I hope in time their prices will come down. For now, ISTM, the IDE+ FWenclosure package offers a much better deal than the SATA+FW enclosure package.

I use daisy chaining when I need access to a lot of data, when editing, so to me, daisy chaining is quite valuable, but of course, needs differ for everybody.

I didn't know about firmware issues, thank you for that, I'll look into it.

And thank you for your guidance, it was very valuable!