Which Hard Drives work in Power Mac G4 Dual 1.42

Built in support exists for ATA-100, Ultra-ATA.
SATA support you need to add a PCI card, or an external Firewire drive that has a SATA bus inside of it.

Firewire ATA-100 and Ultra-ATA cases exist as well which can be used on G5s and Intel Core machines.

Note if you're planning on upgrading to a G5 in the future, a second non-bootable drive from the G4 can be added if it is SATA.

If you are planning on upgrading to an Intel-Core then SATA can be added, though migrating data would have to follow these steps when upgrading:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=435350

Mac Mini, MacBooks, Powerbooks, and Mac Book Pros all use 2.5" drives which don't fit Mac Pros, iMacs, or PowerMacs internally. 3.5" drives fit the latter three.

This page appears to answer that question:

http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/ata100

Your specific Power Mac G4 Dual 1.42 MHz is a member of the Mirrored Drive Doors family. These Macs support one or two ATA-100 drives in the rear, upright two-drive bracket ( Master behind, Slave in front). The front, horizontal brackets supports one or two ATA-66 drives (Master above, Slave below). So four ATA Hard drives can be installed.

The optical Drive enclosure supports one or two E-IDE/ATAPI devices at 33 MHz (Master above, Slave below). A fan blows air in the side of the optical drive enclosure, near the front, when the door is shut.

All the stock cables use Cable Select. A Hard Drive should not share a cable with a slower device. The more heat is generated inside the enclosure, the faster the main the fan will run to dissipate that heat, and the louder it will be.

sATA offers no speed advantage, until such time as the rumored faster drives with "perpendicular" magnetic regions become reality and are faster due to denser packing of the bits. You will need an expensive controller card. Save your money and use the amazing Busses already in that Mac.

sATA offers no speed advantage, until such time as the rumored faster drives with "perpendicular" magnetic regions become reality and are faster due to denser packing of the bits. You will need an expensive controller card. Save your money and use the amazing Busses already in that Mac.

I thought SATA does offer advantages over PATA? What if I want to install two 500GB drives in my system and have to go SATA? Surely, they will be faster than PATA?

The fastest drives currently available are the ones that will be sold as sATA drives, because they are the newest. Those same drives will be sold with SCSI and pATA interfaces, and often with Fiber Channel interfaces. If you want the fastest transfer speeds of anything, choose Fiber Channel.

The advertised transfer rates of today's drives sound very impressive. But the bottleneck in today's drives is not the transfer rate. It is the bit density and the spin rate (RPM). A good 10,000 RPM drive (any interface) can produce a burst of data off the platters at about 50 MegaBytes a second. Then there will be a pause as it syncs up to read the next block.

The drive can be written to at a slightly faster rate, but we typically read four times as often as we write (over a large sample of typical tasks), so the payback of really fast writes to the drive cache is diminished.

sATA's major advantage is that it is Cheaper to manufacture. When that cost savings starts to be passed along to me, I will recommend it. Today you are paying extra for specs you will not see in daily use. What they are selling is Hype.

Would you pay more for a car because it has the motor mounts for the supercharged engine?

PS. Your Mac is exempt from the 128 MB limit:

86178- Macintosh: Using 128 GB or Larger ATA Hard Drives

Message was edited by: Grant Bennet-Alder

Hi Grant!

Thanks for the quick reply. Ok, at the end of the day, which drives would you recommend? I am one for not complaining about my MDD's performance as I always maintain my computer just like I maintain my 2008 Kia spectra. However, if not SATA, then what would be a very fast performing drive for the money? Currently, I have two drives hooked up to the ATA-100 bus: IBM 120GB drive and another IBM 60GB drive(originally from my Digital Audio G4 - now my son's computer).