Upgrading SATA drives & putting old drives into firewire enclosure

I just ran out of space on my two 250GB internal drives on my G5. These were the BTO units, Maxtor 6Y250M0 and I understand they have a 8MB buffer and 9.3ms seek time.
I am planning on purchasing two 500GB drives to replace them. I have a few performance questions and would like to solicit some opinions on some drives.
First, I understand jumping to 500GB would really slow things down, is this true? What about 750GB?
Second, what brand/model would be recommended? I store music, videos, and lots of pictures plus I play heavy processor load games.
Third, SATA 300? My machine is only 150 but I do plan on upgrading one day to a Mac Pro... Will the slowdown be worse than just buying a 150?
Forth, I am planning on purchasing a firewire enclosure for the two older drives, preferably a dual unit, any recommendations there. (For aesthetic purposes I would like something that looks great). I thought about USB but my machine is only USB 1.0 and I just can't bring myself to that slowdown.
Any recommendations and responses are greatly appreciated. I used to sell this stuff for years but have been out of the loop for sometime now...
5 2.0DP w/ 4.5GB, 23", 6800 Ultra Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Thank you japamac, The hatter and tobszanski for your ideas and help. Here is what I ended up doing.
I purchased the OWC Mercury Elite-AL FireWire 800/400 + USB2 Pro Dual SATA drive enclosure to hold both of the Maxtor drives that came with my machine:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW924AL2K/
This enclosure is great, looks like the G5 and has all the connectivity I was looking for. I then purchased two Maxtor MaXLine Pro 500 SATA II drives:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Maxtor/7H500F0/
I used SuperDuper! to copy on the new 500GB and now I am in business, with plenty of space to spare. SuperDuper is a great app: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13803
I was going to use Carbon Copy Cloner but I was reading somewhere that they haven't updated it to run with 10.4 but I am more than satisfied using SuperDuper.
Thank you all for your help....
5 2.0DP w/ 4.5GB, 23", 6800 Ultra Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Hello!!
I am here to ask for help. Let me tell you a bit more about my Mac:
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Well I see that's the problem. There are SATA ones
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How did I know that? I made the same mistake buying one off eBay. You need one like this.
-Bmer
Mac Owners Support Group
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http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
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http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/
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Hello babyharpseal and welcome to Apple Support Communities,
"move the SSD from my old Macbook(complete dead)"
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"The OS X Mavericks Installer, available from the (Apple Store)"
No longer true.
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drive bay 2 - SSD - raid with drive 1
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http://www.cooldrives.com/satoidecofor.html
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Can't put hard drive into enclosure

I rencently took out my hard drive (Bay A) out of my 1.6 Ghz G5 tower and when I tried to put the hard drive into the enclosure there are big black screws that are blocking the way. I bought many Phillips Screwdriver, trying to unscrew those 4 black screws and was unsuccessful! What am I suppose to do now?! The harddrive is still connected to the enclosure but I can't put it in!

I can only go by the drive screws that I have unscrewed in the past. The Drive Screws are shown in Figure 6 here
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/cip/pdf/g5/073-0851.pdf
There is a better picture here
http://www.mac-pro.com/922-6253?sc=2&category=408
I found that the centre of the screw with the cross-head is metal, but the outer curved dome-shaped piece is plastic. If you insert a small flat-bladed screwdriver or blunt knife, carefully, under the outer edge of the plastic collar, where it touches the drive, it can be lifted up and off, exposing the flat side of the central metal screw - which can then be gripped with needle-nosed pliers, or similar, and turned in the same direction as you would to unscrew it with a screwdriver, anti-clockwise.
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Question 1: Is it optimal to have only one of these drives running on each bus? Can I get away with two per bus without serious loss of efficiency? Can I assume that 2 per will run better than 4 per?
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Giraut

giraut wrote:
videocrafter,
not to presume on your time more than i already have -- what a helpful reply you gave. thanks! -- but i just want to make absolutely sure of one thing:
i buy the esata pci-e card you mention from OWC and install it myself (probably pretty easy) and then just plug my G-Tech drives into it, and I'm good to go? No separate esata controller card? I just realized that only two of my four G-Tech drives have the esata connection, so I could plug those two in, leave the other two with my FW 800 connection and save up for a couple more G-Tech drives with the esata connection. And this will make my life better.
Correct?
many, many thanks.
giraut
Hi giraut, your welcome
That is correct, you will not need any additional controller card. You will have to install the driver for the Tempo E4P (make sure you follow the installation instructions) and you'll want to make sure you download the latest driver from Sonnet's website:
http://www.sonnettech.com/support/kb/kb.php?cat=338#position_content
and unless you have some application monitoring for new upgrades, I would check at least once a month if not more often for any new future drivers. They are suppose to be coming out with one here soon to support 64 Bit. Even though FCP does not yet support 64 bit if you choose to run other applications in 64 bit you don't want your eSATA controller to cause any problems.
You'll also need One external shielded eSATA data cables with "I-Shape" connectors for each device you connect to the card. So in your case, you'll need 2 right away. Here is the type of cable you need, it just happens to be made by Sonnet, but you can find cheaper ones (just remember, you get what you pay for).
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technology/TCBSATA11/
There is one bit of insight I would like to give you when swapping any of your internal drives around once you have this card installed. It probably tells you in the owners manual, and I just stopped reading once I got it up and running. However I found out the hard way. The first time that I swapped out one of the "Internal" drives (I swapped out the drive in bay 3 I think it was, makes no difference which bay I'm sure) but I simply shut down my system, unplugged the computer and swapped out the drive. When I started back up, I things didn't' seem right, it wasn't seeing my external drives properly and I got a panic attack (both the computer and me!). Of course my first thought was "YOU'VE GOT TO BE FREAKING KIDDING ME!" So after I took a deep breath, before turning the computer back on, I disconnected my external enclosure, then restarted and everything was find. I then completely shut down, turned on my enclosure and restarted. All was good. I tested my theory again and swapped out another internal drive and all went like clockwork. Here are the exact steps I took. They worked for me, and maybe they will work for someone else, so I'll list them here:
Swapping Internal Drive
1. Eject each external drive from the enclosure and power down the enclosure.
2. Eject and power down the FireWire drive.
3. Power down the computer and swap out drives.
4. With the external enclosures powered off, power up the computer as normal.
5. Accomplish another shut-down.
6. Make sure all of the drives are installed into the enclosure, turn on the power.
7. Power up the computer and keep your fingers crossed.
Personally I've never daisy-chained Firewire drives (although I find it fascinating that Patrick had 19 of them daisy-chained) if I did I would probably only use them for archiving since I capture and edit everything in ProRes 422, but that's another thread. I currently only have one device that I use via firewire 800 which is my external Blu-ray burner. An interesting note here. I initially had my Blu-ray burner connected to my former piece of junk eSata controller card (with the Silicon Image SiI3124 chip and drivers that haven't been updated since before Leopard came out) but for whatever reason, the Tempo E4P wasn't seeing it (Now I'm not sure why, and frankly I didn't take the time to troubleshoot it, so it may be nothing) I just went ahead and connected the burner up as Firewire 800, and connected my 3rd external eSata device (a OWC Mercury Elite Pro USB/Firewire/eSata drive) to port 2 of my Tempo E4P, with my 5 drive bay FirmTek/5PM eSata enclosure connected to port 1 of the E4P (leaving 2 open ports on the E4P).
So, If I were you, for now I would go ahead and daisy-chain those other 2 Firewire drives, unless I needed to use them to capture and edit in anything other than DV, or for archiving only. Otherwise, I would get another 5 bay enclosure and take those 2 SATA drives out of those 2 existing firewire enclosures (Im assuming they are SATA drives inside their enclosure, I would surely think so) and put them in the external eSata enclosure.
One last ti-bit of information that may or may not be useful. When you get an external 5 bay enclosure with the port Multiplier, pay a little extra for a brand that you can trust. Personally, since I already have one, I would stick with the SeriTek SATA5PM (their built like a tank!), or go with a Sonnet, OWC has a new price on their Fusion D500P that's pretty appealing. I would definitely be cautious if wanting to purchase anything for a specific company with the word "Cool" in their name, the only thing that is cool, and it's only cool for them is they get your money and you get .... well you know!
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/SATA5PM/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technology/FUSD5P00TBR/
Just in case anyone is wondering, I get no compensation in any fashion for any of the items that I have specifically linked to in this post. These items are simply ones that I have carefully done my homework on, and if it can save someone else a little time by helping them with their homework, then that makes me feel good. I'm all for helping others save time, it's the most precious resource we have.
Message was edited by: videocrafter

MSI NEO 4 Platinum with SATA Drive

I have recently built a new machine with the following specs but I am having problems with system stability in windows and was wondering whether it's because of the way I set up the hard drive.
Specs:
MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum
AMD Athlon 64 3500 Winchester
Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu
1GB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM
Sapphire X800 XT
Sound Blaster Audigy Player
Maxtor 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive
Maxtor 40GB IDE Hard Drive
550W PSU
I plugged my SATA drive into slot 1 and booted from the maxblast 3 CD to partition and set up the hard drive. I then installed windows 98 and upgraded to windows 2000. My system seems to be slow and laggy, though it seems mostly fine in games. When I listen to music and browse a CD at the same time the sound stutters and lags. I am getting lots of slow down when doing lots of things on the computer but it shouldn't slow down as much as it is. I am also getting windows error messages.
Is there a different way I should have installed the hard drive. I can't boot from my windows 2000 disk in dos because it's only upgrade version. I read on the forum about adding the SATA drive to a raid array before installing windows but I don't understand what this means. Can you help?
The floppy drive also doesn't seem to work so I couldn't install SATA drivers at windows setup. How can I get it working because the lead seems to be connected correctly as it gives an error message on boot up with the purple stripe the other side of the floppy drive.

Quote
I can do it with a windows XP upgrade CD surely
yes
Quote
Me Yesterday, 12:55
If you have an XP upgrade CD follow the following steps.
1) Decide which HD you wish to install XP on.
If the Sata - Then turn of PC & unplug IDE Drive, this is a windows thing, as XP will see the Ide drive b4 the Sata & try to create the 1st drive as system drive. You can plug the ide back in when the install is complete.
2) Insert XP Cd. Enter Bios - Advanced bios change boot order so that CD is 1st device. or press f11 as pc posts, & select CD.
3) The PC should now boot from the XP CD.
You don't need to load any floppy drivers.
But XP will ask to see a qualifying product, put in your 2000 or 98 CD.
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Upgrading SATA drives & putting old drives into firewire enclosure

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