I was thinking about just hooking up a 1TB drive via the built in Firewire 400, but wonders just how possible, or easy, it is to get a PCI eSATA card, or even a PCI FW 800 card?

Or is the PM G4 just too old and clunky to bother?

Are there driver issues?

I currently have a PCI USB 2.0 multi-port card that I got for nix, and that I hardly use.

Maybe there is a mixed port solution, thoughts?

just tiny bit of info, but on my PB G4 copying via FW 800 works a treat...

Ditto, mallo.

Whilst you can get a PCI card that will do eSATA, there isn't much point, especially if you were hoping for it to let you use external eSATA hard drives in a removable manner like you currently do with FireWire and USB. There's only one card that I'm aware of that gives you un-mountable eSATA but it's over A$400 -- other cards insist that the (e)SATA drive be present when you power on the machine, and once they're mounted you cannot unmount them (as far as OSX is concerned, they're just as inflexible as the internal IDE ports).

The other reason why it's not worth bothering with an eSATA card is that the PCI bus becomes the bottleneck. Your onboard FireWire 400 port will operate faster than a FireWire 400 PCI card.

If you want to add internal SATA drives, then have a look at a Sonnet or ProJovian card. Otherwise, stick with using the drive externally.

Okay thanks all, nix on the eSATA, but Brains do you have any concerns on PCI FireWire 800?

Others above think it is the better option.