

The cheapest way to add a SATA drive to these Power Macs is with a SATA-to-IDE bridge. Let’s look at options for adding SATA to G3 and G4 Power Macs, along with other options for connecting SSDs. The company also makes IDE flash modules that connect to a standard 40-pin connector.Ī year ago, I wrote IDE Is Dead Long Live SATA!, and things have only moved further in that direction since then. Prices are high in comparison to SATA SSDs.
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UPDATE: A reader let me know that Transcend makes 2.5″ SSDs that use the IDE bus – and that he’s installed one in his WallStreet PowerBook, cutting boot time for Mac OS 8.6 in half.

In fact, almost all SSDs are SATA drives and us the 2.5″ notebook form factor. As happened when IDE displaced SCSI on Macs, we are now seeing less and less IDE hard drives on the market, and to the best of my knowledge there are no 3.5″ IDE solid-state drives (SSDs). With the switch to Intel, SATA replaced IDE across the board for hard drives. Since all G5 models have built-in SATA support, we won’t focus on them here. Apple offered PCI-X on the Power Mac G5 models from mid 2003 through late 2005, when the last generation of G5 Power Macs was introduced with dual-core CPUs and PCI Express. That was gone with the next model, the Blue & White Power Mac G3 (early 1999), which was IDE only, although Apple did offer SCSI cards for those who needed access to SCSI drives and peripherals.įor the bulk of the Power Mac’s history (mid 1995 through late 2005), the PCI expansion slot was the norm. However, it wasn’t until late 1997 that IDE made its way into Apple’s pro-oriented Power Mac line with the introduction of the Beige Power Mac G3, which still had a built-in SCSI bus. The Quadra 630 and it’s near twins, the Performa and LC 630 Series (1994) marked the first time a desktop Mac used IDE instead of SCSI for hard drives. Starting with the Macintosh Plus in 1986, Macs supported SCSI drives. In the world of computing, there are incremental, almost invisible changes, and there are significant, game changing ones.įor Mac users, one of those game changers was the move from more intelligent and more expensive SCSI hard drives to IDE* drives, which are electronically incompatible.
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One of the best ways to speed up your Mac is with a bigger, faster hard drive (adding more system memory is the other), but there are less hard drives for PowerPC ‘Books than before, and they tend to be lower in capacity than today’s Serial ATA (SATA) drives.
