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PowerBook G4 Q&A - Revised February 15, 2007
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Is it possible to add external SATA to the PowerBook G4?
For readers who may not be familiar with the term, PC Magazine defines "SATA" or "Serial ATA" as providing a "a point-to-point channel between motherboard and drive" rather than Parallel ATA which is a "master-slave architecture that supports two drives on the same cable".
PC Magazine also notes that Serial ATA (II) provides a maximum transfer rate of "3 Gbps (300 MBps)" and uses a small four pin cable compared to the 40-pin "ribbon" cable used by parallel.
For a far more technical definition, you could choose to review InterfaceBus.
Essentially, SATA uses a much smaller cable and is faster than the standard it replaced.
Photo Credit: FirmTek
The same company that offers an SATA ExpressCard/34 adapter for the MacBook Pro also offers an SATA PC Card adapter for the PC card equipped PowerBook G4 models. Others are available as well, but FirmTek describes the company SeriTek/1SM2 offering as:
A Type II 32-bit Cardbus compatible host adapter which brings superior Serial ATA 1.5 Gbps storage transfer performance to notebook computers.
The SeriTek/1SM2 shares many advanced features with FirmTek's popular line of SeriTek host adapters such as best-in-class performance, the ability to hot-swap hard disk drives without having to power down the notebook (even drives which are configured as part of a RAID array), [with] ease-of-use comparable to USB and FireWire.
FirmTek notes that the card supports two 3.5" SATA hard drives, and MacOS X 10.2 or later, as well as MacOS 9, Windows 2000/2003/XP, and Linux.
For a variety of PowerBook G4 upgrades, please visit site sponsor Other World Computing.
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