ATA or SATA controller cards?

Hi

Either of the PCI cards should work fine with your computer. I considered the exact same cards when I upgraded and went with the SATA version. The main advantages are the cabling is a lot easier, SATA drives are more modern and can be carried over to newer Macs such as the G5 (without adapters) and they're also marginally faster. Note the speeds stated are the maximum theoretical transfer rates for the interface. In practice the speed is limited by the drive itself. The fastest available only achieve ~ 80MBytes/sec substained, no where near the 133MBytes/sec of ATA/133 or the 150MBytes/sec of SATA. The only 'disadvantage' of the SATA card is it supports two drives rather than four, but this does mean each drive has it's own channel.

The Sonnet Tempo SATA is a rebadged version of the FirmTek SeriTek 1S2, which OWC also sells slightly cheaper. There may be some slight differences in the box contents though. I think the Sonnet comes with drive mounting screws and a power adapter cable. I'm not sure whether the FirmTek does. Some SATA drives have the new style power connector and the old style molex power connector. Others (Seagate?) only have the new style, so you need an adapter cable to be able to use the molex power connectors found in older Macs.

I hope this helps.

Gothboy,
Where to start? Well, I have a Firmtek 1V4 attached to a 500GB Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM 16 Mb cache. So lets start with the hard drive. SATA ia a plus for the afore mentioned cabling issues but also the 16 Mb cache found in most BIG drives gives a nice performance increase. Also, the big drives are going to fill up slower and therefore stay at peak performance longer ( The fuller a HD gets the slower it gets) and a 500 GB drive can be had in the sub $200.00 range (I gave 168.00 for mine shipped). This isn't much more that a good PATA drive these days. However, the speed difference isn't going to be that much better since SATA 150 is actually 1.5 Gbits/sec. This translates to approximately 180 Mbytes/sec (more on this later). As a last point, the Hitachi deskstars use less power than some other drives ( Run a search, there are some great reviews out there) and have legacy (Molex) connectors. This isn't a big deal as Molex/SATA power adapters are cheap but it does keep things cleaner.
So, on to the controller. As Rodney stated Firmtek makes the Sonnet card so either is a fine choice. The big plus for either of these cards is that they don't need software to run them and therefore can be used to control a BOOT drive(this is what I run, OS X opens so much faster). You have lots of options here (two drives or four or four internal +four hot swappable external) and your needs and budget are the only deciding factors. As for my choice? The fact that Firmtek spent about an hour and half talking with me before I even bought the controller and then hooked me up with a sweet deal on the drive clinched it for me. Do some research and you can't go wrong. There are a few minor issues to be aware of but a quick call to the card maker of choice will set you on the right path. That's my $.02. Good luck.

Cheers,
Chris

P.S. Most SATA drives these days are SATA 3.0. While this kind of speed is a pipe dream in a G4 (Not enough bandwidth on the PCI slot) the drives autoconfigure (SATA 150) and when you get that NEW shiney Mac Pro( or PPC G5) your drives will throttle right back up to SATA 3.0. Oh and like Rodney states, these are theroretical burst rates, not real world numbers.


1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA (OS X) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D,FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, BFG 6800 GT oc

1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA (OS X) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D,FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, BFG 6800 GT oc

1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA (OS X) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D,FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, BFG 6800 GT oc

1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA (OS X) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D,FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, BFG 6800 GT oc

1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA (OS X) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D,FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, BFG 6800 GT oc

" The ATA is for drives smaller than 137Gigs and has a processing rate of 133mb per second and the SATA is for larger drives and has a data transfer rate of 1Gps(Wow)."

All ATA-133 controller cards manufactured today should have 48-bit LBA, enabling the use of mega-sized drives. Older ATA-66 or ATA-100 controller cards had the 137 GB limitation. The best price for a Mac-compatible, ATA-133 controller card (Acard AEC-6280M) can be found here.

Goth,
The SATA drive/controller was my second upgrade (RAM first) and I was running the stock 466 MHz processor. If anything, the HD/controller will make your Mac faster since the data access will be much quicker. As a low tech test I counted the spinning gear revolutions to start up and got the following results:

WD 30 GB 5400 RPM 2 MB cache ATA-30revs.
Hitachi 500 GB 7200 RPM 16 MB cache SATA- 5(!) revs.

Another indication of the performance upgrade-

Write zeros to disk (Single Pass):
WD 30 GB 5400 RPM 2MB cache ATA-54 minutes (.6GB/min)
Hitachi 500 GB 7200 RPM 16 MB cache SATA-1 hour 59 minutes (4.2 GB/min)

This is 17 times more data in twice the time! Or roughly 7 times faster.

So, there you go. Note these are low tech tests and I'm running a 1.4 GHz (The write to zero test didn't change regardless) processor but the bottle neck you will remove will help not hinder.

Cheers,
Chris

1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA (OS X) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D,FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, BFG 6800 GT oc

The blurb about most SATA PCI cards mentions they use something called bus mastering which off loads the data handling from the CPU, so if anything it may well tax your CPU less.

Goth,
Faster? YES! Less taxing on the CPU? I can't say for sure but maybe just marginally.

Here's the test I tried (Low tech yet again)
1)Open Activity Monitor.
2)Set it to watch the CPU. Let everything settle down (Even having the dock pop up will spike the CPU a little)
3)Open iTunes and look for a spike in the CPU activity.

With the WD the CPU maxed at 77% User (with iTunes 6.x.x)

With the Hitachi SATA the CPU maxed at 84%( But this with LOTS more music, iTunes 7.0.2 and coverflow)

So, that gives us a huge maybe. On to the speed test.

1)Get a stopwatch (I use Xnote on a laptop)
2)Get ready.
3)Start both at once.
4)Stop the clock as soon as the winow pops open.

The results?

WD ATA 7 seconds
Hitachi SATA 3 seconds

So, there you go. Apply said DATA as you see fit. Hope it helps.

Cheers,
Chris

1.4 GHz Sonnet "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA (OS X) Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D,FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, BFG 6800 GT oc

SATA is roughly 3 times faster than FireWire 400, although the speed of the drive itself is the main limitation. The following link contains some benchmarks:

http://www.barefeats.com/hard30.html

I seem to remember a thread on the MacGurus.Com forum where they tested an ATA drive on the logic board ATA controller, an ATA drive on a PCI card ATA controller, a SATA drive on a PCI card SATA controller and an external FireWire drive. The differences in CPU usage were small and not really worth basing any decisions on.