serial ata adapter and power to sata hard drives

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floodstone

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

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.
 
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.
 
Hmm, I get a "500 Null" error when I visit eshop.macsales.com. I'm guessing (vaguely) that this is similar to a "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error" which means their admin screwed something up.

So anyway, since I cannot see the power adapter you posted, is the PowerMac G4 "molex connector" the same big, clunky molex connector used in the IBM-compatible PC world? Would the "standard-to-SerialATA" power adapter I'd buy at BestBuy or outpost.com work in my PowerMac? Thanks!
 
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