PCI SATA or IDE Card

Sonnet has a good selection of Mac compatible cards
<http://www.sonnettech.com/product/pci_adptrs.html>
If you plan to use the drives later in a newer Mac, use SATA.

In the US, you'll find the best price for a Mac-compatible ATA-133 controller card here.

Either choice is pretty good but I opted for the SATA. I chose a firmtek seritek 1V4(supports 4 drives) paired to a 500 GB Hitachi Deskstar (7200 rpm, 16MB cache) and have been VERY pleased! It's way fast( I zeroed out all 500 GB in 2 hours with Disk Utility) and since the 1V4 is actually a backwards PCI-x card it can travel with me to my next Mac. Other firmtek options are the 1S2 (supports 2 drives and about the same price as all the others)or the 1VE2+2 (supports 2 drives internally and 2 external hot swappable drives). Anyway, lots of choices and not to much cash outlay (I'm out less that $300.00). I guess if you already have a big drive (E-IDE) I'd go that route otherwise I'd go with the SATA (new technology that can only get faster, just look at the Western Digital Raptor X SATA) since it is on the upswing while I think IDE is slowly headed out. Either choice will keep you in good stead. Good luck, I agonized for better than a month before I finally picked.

Cheers,
Chris

G4 466 "digital audio", 1.5 GB RAM , 30GB HD(OS X only) Mac OS X (10.4.6) Pioneer DVR-111DBK , FirmTek SeriTek 1V4 , Hitchi 500GB SATA II HD

Hi

Mac compatible IDE/ATA and SATA PCI cards are available from a number of companies including FirmTek, Sonnet, ACARD and SIIG.

Personally I'd go for a SATA card as in general they're no more expensive and as already mentioned the drives should be compatible with any future Macs.

The FirmTek SeriTek 1S2 and Sonnet Tempo are popular and recommended two port choices. I believe they're actually the same card, just rebranded versions of each other. Both have large drive support, are plug and play (no third party drivers required), support booting from any attached drive and support deep sleep (in most cases).

Hey, get this gadget:

http://www.directusbstore.co.uk/cnb/shop/directusbstore?productID=495&search=ide &op=catalogue-product_info-null

It's so clever. You can use full size and laptop sized harddrives. Whats cool though, is that if you have installed a USB2 PCI card, a lot of them have an internal USB2 port. Connect this adaptor to that internal USB2 port and then connect that to your new SATA internal hard drive you just bought (larger in size than the 128GB limit G4s have) and you're away. Only catch is, that the internal drive throughput (data speed), won't be as fast as your orginal hard drives, but unless you're living on Final Cut, you won't really notice.

Hi, Tristan!

Before you buy anything, please confirm your Boot ROM version by checking the Hardware Overview section of your System Profiler to see if it is 4.3.3f2. If it is, your QS 2002 G4 already has built-in large drive support. If it's any other version, you'll need the card to use larger drives to full-formatted capacity.

If you do need more than two ATA internal drives, however, you'll need the card anyway. I just want to insure you're aware that you might have the built-in large drive support, which might alter your overall approach, if you do have it.

Gary

AP,

My boot rom is 4.3.3f2 so that means it supports large hard disk support already??

Yes, with a minor caveat that applies to MDD/FW800 Macs as well; you must format it with OS X 10.2 or later, which in your case is not an issue. Apple never did formally acknowledge this support for some of the QS/QS2002 models. I could speculate on some valid reasons why Apple did not, but it's against the Discussions rules... 😉

Gary

1GHz DP G4 Quicksilver 2002, 400MHz B&W rev.2 G3, Mac SE30 Mac OS X (10.4.5) 5G iPod, Epson 2200 & R300 & LW Select 360 Printers, Epson 3200 Scanner