SATA external drive question

pixmaniowa

pixmaniowa

Registered
I pulled one of the SATA drives from my G5 before it went away. I thought I would use it as an external drive with my mac book. I went to Fry's and could not get a straight answer from them. Someone please tell me what to do to
1. Use it as an external drive
2. Use it as a start-up drive if possible.
3. Somehow explain the whole SATA/E-SATA thing.
Thanks,
Robert
 
You could use something like this:

http://www.cooldrives.com/seatatousb20.html

Or, you could pick up a FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure that uses SATA as the internal drive connector and use it that way.

I don't think you can use E-SATA with your MacBook, since there's no E-SATA connections and no way to add a PCMCIA card (or the like) to add E-SATA capabilities. The easiest way is to get a FireWire or USB enclosure that supports SATA hard drives and use the drive that way.

I believe you can boot from both FireWire and USB 2.0 on the Intel-based Macintosh computers, but I would verify that somewhere else if possible.
 
I don't know about Intel models but I'm almost 100% certain that a USB2 drive can NOT boot a PowerPC Mac. An external Firewire drive can, however, be made bootable. SATA...I'm not sure.

eSATA, by the way, simply refers to an external (that's the 'E') SATA port for hooking a SATA device into your mac. As ElDiabloConCaca noted, though, you may not be able to do that with your model.

External enclosures have one INternal (to the enclosure) interface which determines what kind of drive you can put in it and, typically, one or maybe two EXternal interfaces (ports) which will determine how you connect it to your mac. You want one where the INternal interface is SATA to accommodate your SATA drive. The external ports for connecting to your laptop can be Firewire or USB2 (or eSATA or, sometimes, ethernet). Your best bet is probably a Firewire version for bootability.

Hope this helps...
 
This is an older thread, but it will be the place where I put a great big

w00t!!

because I just replaced the rather meek-sized 60 gig (55 formatted :( ) SATA drive in my MacBook and bought a simple portable USB 2.0 case. I started the computer and went to Start-up Disk and it showed the 60 gig.

I chose it, restarted and !!! w00t !!! again - it starts up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top