Just running this by our panel of experts to see if there's anything
ill-advised or ill-considered about it, as SATA to eSATA is something
I've no experience with.
The first and most important question is whether connecting an
internal SATA drive, through its PCI controller, to an external drive
with (among others) an eSATA port by means of a SATA-eSATA adapter
cable even works to begin with, whether the external drive will even
be recognized. If not, the rest of this is moot.
I have more PCI cards than slots for them, which isn't a bad thing.
When I added an external drive, I wasn't at all sure I wanted to use
Time Machine for backups. I stuck with CCC. At first the external
drive connection was through my FW800 PCI card, but that card got
bounced by a sound card which appears to have moved in more or less
permanently. So it was back to FW400. Cloning was always time-
consuming, and as recent work has created more to back up, it's only
gotten more so. I haven't found incremental backups with CCC to be
much of a time-saver, either, but this has become a moot point,
because I've decided to give Time Machine a shot and let it be the
incremental specialist. I still want bootable clones, so I'm not done
with the very useful CCC, of course.
FW800 would be preferable for the external drive connection, and it's
conceivable that the Gigabit Ethernet card could come out to
accommodate that. I don't know if I'd recognize the difference going
back to the internal modem. But this external drive offers eSATA
connectivity as well. Trouble is, what I've got internally is a SATA
HD with SATA controller PCI card (two ports). Theoretically (and
perhaps quite mistakenly so), I can get an SATA-eSATA adapter cable to
achieve what I suppose would be a SATA-level connection to the
external drive. The trouble with that is that this cable can't get in
through the back panel as things currently stand - the SATA controller
PCI card has no ports or openings on its back plate. I had the oddball
idea of taking out the ethernet PCI card to create an opening to snake
the SATA-eSATA cable though. Concerns here are that it's a choice of
SATA over FW800 that might be overkill for what I really need (and
Time Machine works with nothing but FireWire anyway, or? And what
about Target Disk Mode, if it came to that? Also seems to be strictly
FireWire), and that I don't know what the impact of this small opening
in the back panel on proper air flow within the case might be. I
suppose a bit of duct tape could get around that and the dust entry
factor. I also had the even odder idea of, instead, connecting the
SATA-eSATA cable with the side door partially open whenever I wanted
to create my bootable clone backups and getting presumably speedier
results.
I don't know if this is easy to estimate on a casual basis, but if it
takes 3 hours for CCC to make a bootable clone connected to an
external drive through FW400, how much less through FW800 and less
still through SATA (the SATA-eSATA adapter cable)? I don't *need*
faster in any desperate way. I can let the computer work overnight if
it comes to that. But if I can *have* faster, well, of course I'll
take it. That's only natural. I'm thinking that for Time Machine's
incremental work, the FireWire standard won't matter much. But for
CCC, faster than FireWire would be great.
Sean Carroll
[email protected]
Power Mac G4 AGP "Sawtooth" 1.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM, SATA 750 GB hard drive,
Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 and Tiger 10.4.11,
Gigabit Ethernet & M-Audio Revolution 7.1 PCI cards, ATI Radeon 9800
Pro 128 MB AGP
--
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
