On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Michael G.M. <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't think the SATA drives support SMART do they?
Yes, they do. Or I suppose to be more precise I should say all the SATA drives which I am familiar with support SMART. On a more general note, there seems to be some confusion about the relationship of SATA to PATA drives. It's become common for people to refer to an "IDE" drive when they actually mean a PATA drive. Technically, both SATA and PATA drives are still ATA and thus (informally) IDE. According to WIkipedia (so it MUST be correct ;-), IDE just stands for Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. It's a very, very old term (in computer years) and originated back when the device controllers were first integrated onto the actual hard disk. ATA is just the meaningless techno-babble of AT Attachment. (Advanced Technology Attachment?) ATA refers (I think) to the underlying commands used to tell a hard drive what to do. Things like "Write to block 10256" and "Read from block 810563". My understanding is that in order to simplify the transition from PATA to SATA, the SATA drives still can support all the commands the previous PATA drives did. In other words, the way in which an operating system usually talks to a hard drive was preserved and required no software changes just to use the newer drive. What changed was the way commands and data was moved to/from the hard drive. SATA does it one bit at a time or serially. PATA moves bits in parallel. But the actual bits being moved didn't require changing. (SATA added new capabilities, sure. But that just means SATA drives support more commands than the PATA. They also still support anything a PATA drive could reasonably be expected to do). > My G-Drive Q is a SATA drive and it doesn't > show up in disk utility as SMART supported. That's one thing that > concerns me about switching to SATA. How is the device attached? If it's via USB/Firewire then you'll never see SMART since there is no support in either attachment protocol (at the moment) for working with the SMART support on a drive. If the hard drive is directly attached via a PATA cable to your motherboard, then I'm not sure what is up. Have you got a make & model number for the drive? > I'd love to see the speed boost > in my G3 with SATA though especially with PS and Snapz pro2. Don't know whether or not you'd see a speed boost with your current hardware. Probably would. It certainly shouldn't be any slower. ;-) And of course you'd want to make sure you don't have problems on your hardware with the 128GB size limit restrictions. (I know that has been discussed in depth here in the past. Unfortunately I can't keep straight in my head which older Mac models can do what). -irrational john -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
