serial ata adapter and power to sata hard drives

[floodstone]

i am looking into getting a serial ata adapter for my g4 to install sata hard drives. i have a question about power supply to serial ata hard drives. the pic i saw of a seagate sata hd showed the power connector and it did not look like the standard hd power connector on the g4. is it different? and, if so, what do i need to do to accomodate new serial ata drive power connectors?

any help in this would be greatly appreciated as i need to get a new hd for my comp this week.

as a side note (and the reason i need a new hd) if you ever buy a new mac specify (as is possible, but i forgot to specify with this purchase) that they do NOT put an ibm deskstar hd in it. i had one meltdown a couple of years ago and this one is showing the signs the other did just before self destructing. they are crap.

thanks in advance for help.

[brianleahy]

Some (though not all) SATA drives have both old & new style power connectors. For instance, I just bought & installed a Maxtor SATA drive, and it had both types of power connectors built in (along with a stern warning to use one or the other, but not both).

If you buy a drive that has only the new-style power connector, you can get an old-style-to-SATA-style power adapter for about $10. Odds are, anywhere you might buy your SATA PCI card will also carry the power adapters.

[floodstone]

thanks for the help.

[Lycander]

Just FYI, the "old style" power connector is a 4-pin Molex connector. Might help you to know if you do a search for Molex to SATA power connector adapters.

[floodstone]

an addition to my earlier question just occurred to me: if i install the serial ata adapter am i still able to use my existing pata hard drive through the original connector with the serial ata adapter and sata hard dive.

[brianleahy]

am i still able to use my existing pata hard drive through the original connector

I would defintiely think so. Some years back, I had a G3 tower, and I installed an ATA66 card+drive. It worked just dandy & still allowed me access to my built-in ATA33 drive.

[floodstone]

thanks again.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I can confirm that add-on ATA/SATA PCI cards do not remove any other functionality from your computer. That's what they're for -- more hard drives. If they disabled the internal ports, they'd be useless cards.

You can also boot from the new hard drive(s) connected to the new card. I recently moved my boot drive from the internal ATA/33 bus to my PCI ATA/100 bus and the improvement was noticeable -- not phenomenal, but noticeable.