New Hard Drive Hotness

Tiger being released on April 29th was enough incentive for me to rationalize buying a fancy new Serial ATA hard drive. For a while now, I’d been eyeing the Western Digital Raptor, which is still the fastest SATA hard drive you can buy. However, it’s only 74 GB big and costs $185 (lowest price I could find).

Then I saw a Barefeats article comparing the Raptor to a Maxtor DiamondMax 10. The question was which was the ultimate G5 boot drive. Well, I don’t have a G5, but I figure the question is just as valid for a G4 (and I’ll be moving to a G5 eventually). The verdict was that the Maxtor drive was the better drive because the performance was comparable, it was much larger (300 GB), and a little cheaper ($180 at ZipZoomFly).

To be able to attach an SATA drive to my G4, I also ordered a Firmtek Seritek PCI SATA card from Other World Computing. Luckily, I quickly realized I’d need a power adapter cable and ordered that as well. Thanks to ZipZoomFly having free 2-day shipping and Other World Computing having a 2-day shipping for $5, I should have the whole kit ‘n caboodle on Friday. I’ll try some Xbench tests to compare my stock hard drive and external firewire drive to it.

I’ll keep the drive virginal for the Tiger installation. Once that’s installed, I’ll share experiences about the boot delay (due to booting from a PCI card). That week I also plan on talking about each feature and my thoughts on it. I’ll even do some screenshots (I should have switched webhosts by then).