SATA vs ATA in a G4

tony1tony1
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I bought and installed a Sonnet SATA card for my PPC G4 mainly for the cost of SATA drives which are relatively cheap, larger in size, ease of installation and I could always put these drives in a newer machine.



My question is about the current speed as it sits in the G4. It's an MDD and the system bus is 166mhz, so is that what the drive transfer rate is based on, 166mhz (per second)? Have I gained any speed at all compared to the old ATA? Sure seems snappier.



Thx for any help

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    kmac1036kmac1036 Posts: 281member
    the 166mhz is the bus clock or speed, but not the data bandwidth it moves (tho, it does factor in). You are seeing some speed boost due to the newer drives and better caching with the SATA interface. If you have the old drive still in the machine, you can bench mark it with xbench (www.xbench.com). It will do the whole system but you can just test hard drives, internal, external, RAIDs, as long as they are fat32 or HFS.
Sign In or Register to comment.