I recently obtained a 20", revision A iMac G5 for free. It boots, but sits with a blinking folder icon with a question mark on it. From my research this means that the HDD is probably bad (sort of confirmed by the fact that I can't install Ubuntu on it). I have also opened it up and noticed some bulging and leaking capacitors which is apparently a really common problem, I know how to get replacements and do that repair.

 

I am having trouble finding a suitable replacement hard drive. From what I can tell, the logic board in this iMac only supports SATA 1.5gb/s transfer protocol, but I can't find any new mainstream drives on Amazon or Newegg that support this, they all have 3.0 or 6.0 gb/s transfer now. Does anyone know where I could get such a drive? I am looking for anywhere from 120 gb to 500 gb and want to stay on a decent budget, taking into account that I got this for free so I don't really want to put money into it as I am unsure how many more problems it has.

 

I also need to find an apple keyboard that has option and command keys, etc. that I can use to boot with alternate devices.

I'm pretty sure all SATA are backwards compatible.

Im up to 95% sure that any SATA drive will work, it will be clocked at slower speeds due to the motherboard to 1.5 g/s. The 5% uncertainty is because it is a Mac.

After your replies I looked up SATA backwards compatibility and it seems that 3gb/s are compatible with 1.5gb/s boards. But I can't find anything that says 6gb/s drives are backwards compatible 2 generations. I guess I should just get a 3gb/s drive?

Id just get a 3.0gb/s drive, there's no point paying more for SATA III if you can't use it.