I bought THIS card last night at a local store and installed it with a spare 80GB SATA drive I had. WOW what a difference in speed! I recomend everone do this upgrade!

No, you cannot boot from this adapter. What I did for the time being is put the smallest spare IDE driver I have IDE, formatted as HFS and only with BOOT.IMG on it. Everything else is installed to the SATA drive.

Eventually I will replace the IDE HD with a tiny DoM (Disk on Module) and replace the SATA drive with a SSD, maybe next month.

Good stuff people, cheap upgrade! Kronos gave me the idea and it is a cheaper upgrade than finding a Mac specific bootable SATA PCI card.

Looks like the card I have been running for the past year or so ...

That is a great buy.
I paid about 50% more for mine.
Work great, don't they?
It should provide much faster disk access then the Quicksilver's ATA66 controllers.

About to do the same as well thanks to redrumloa. Got a 128MB ide flash card and a pci sata card. Gonna try out a 30GB SSD drive and see how that goes.

It's really good! I tested today with a 320 gb hard disk!!
Question: wich filesystem are you using? I have selected fat32L and everything seems to go right. Is this correct or I have to select a different one?
Thanks in advance!

Jambalah,

I am using SFS since the HD is only 80GB. If/when I get a bigger HD I will try out IceFS.

[ Edited by redrumloa 12.10.2012 - 07:22 ]

Jambalah,
Quote:

How is that working for you?
I've considered FAT32 myself (since it supports fairly large volumes), but I haven't given it a try yet.

@Jim:
not so good.... I tried either fat32l and sfs with the same result: when I try to copy a big file system hangs. I tried with drag 'n' drop, with file master but everytime same behaviour. When I drag'n'drop the file systems hangs immediately, with a file master I reached 320 M for a file of 650 before everything freezed but this isn't a costant since sometimes the freeze occours quickly. I created a 50 G partition to make tests and my card is a SIL3512 pci.

Update:
I tested more my sil3512 pci card and problems are still here. I used a jumper on hard disk so to have a maximum transfer rate of 1.5G/150Mb per second, according to the specification of sata card. That didn't helped and when I tried to copy big file from a ide hd to sata hd system hangs. I tried setting higer buffer values in System/settings but still no luck.
I tried the sata card on a Quicksilver too but on that machine things went worst: system hanged even with little files... Mounted the sata card on MDD again and tried the inverse operation: copied a big file from sata to ide partition and that worked flawless. So, if I try to copy a file bigger than 200mb (approx) system hangs, smaller it works.
Is there some settings I am missing? I did those tests in Fat32l mode and SFS mode with same 50G partition and same results.

I'm having the same problem. I have the exact same SATA card and I can't copy files, but it appears reading them is ok, I can playback MP3s but it will hang if if the files are large. This card worked fine under my Pegasos II.

I tried playback of ripped DVDs and those playback just fine also. If I try moving them to another partition, the machine hangs also.

I have never had any problems with my 3512 card, the biggest difference most likely is that I do not have any IDE HD connected (and my card is ofcourse flashed with mac bios).
I am using SFS on system partition (125 Gb) and IceFS on the secondary partition (179 Gb), the size of the hd is 500Gb (have also OSX installed). Just tried copying a 1.2Gb file across partitions both ways, no problem.

I tried flashing it with the mac bios. It won't, i get a bus error.

Seems like he flashing does not work in some G4 Macs, same happened to me but everything went fine when I flashed the card with a G5 at work

Gonna bring one of my sata card to work tomorrow. they are both 3512's, Thanks for the idea, i'm willing to try this!!

Jim,
Quote:

Is this SATA controller in your MDD PowerMac now Jim?

Is the speed difference enough to make it worth my while to get one of these SATA PCI cards and a SATA hard drive to replace my Ultra IDE drive on the IDE 100MHz controller within the MDD PowerMac (or is the fastest IDE controller inside the MDD an IDE 133MHz controller?) I know that all three IDE controllers within the MDD PowerMac towers are all different speeds, but can't remember if there is a 33MHz, 66MHz & 100MHz, or if the combination of IDE controllers are 66MHz, 100MHz & 133MHz instead.

I have a couple of 64mb Compact Flash cards and could use one of them with an IDE to Compact Flash adapter, formatted as HFS for my Boot partition, plus remove all other IDE hard drives and Optical drive and replace them with a SATA hard drive and DVD+/-RW optical drive, but only want to go that route if it is trouble free and considerably faster than the IDE counterparts.

I think your suggestion to switch was when you were using your Quicksilver, with a slower IDE controller, so I wonder if your recommendation is still the same now that you are using an MDD PowerMac?

[ Edited by amigadave 28.10.2012 - 16:31 ]

> the IDE 100MHz controller within the MDD PowerMac (or is the fastest IDE
> controller inside the MDD an IDE 133MHz controller?) I know that all three
> IDE controllers within the MDD PowerMac towers are all different speeds,
> but can't remember if there is a 33MHz, 66MHz & 100MHz, or if the combination
> of IDE controllers are 66MHz, 100MHz & 133MHz instead.

It's 33, 66 and 100 in the MDD.

I kept on testing sata and sometimes all seems to go well. I tried to copy a big directory (arrived to a 1.8 gb) with a file manager and everything was ok. Tried later hanged system...
Question: why flashing bios of sata card? This card work flawless with Pegasos II and I remember I read a "Fixed SATA cards support on PowerMacs." in the 3-0 releases note. Nothing about a mac bios. Am I missing something?

Andreas is (of course) right.
And no, I don't really think the speed improvement is so great that it warrants adding one of these to an MDD.
I just had it left over from my Quicksilver.
That being said, there are SSDs, hybrid drives and drives with much larger caches that might help performance.
Considering the transfer rate limitations of PCI (which I'm sure Andres can quote), there is little advantage using an SATA controller over the MDD's built-in ATA100 controller.

I guess it's how your AGP card needs to have a mac bios in order to work. I'm sure someone here can explain better.

pan1k,
Quote:

Close enough, but in this case its only necessary if you want to boot from an SATA (and Kronos has alrewady listed a way to move most of the OS files to the SATA and boot from a minimal PATA set up).

You can use an Sil controller as a secondary controller after booting w/o a bios change.

> why flashing bios of sata card? This card work flawless with Pegasos II
> and I remember I read a "Fixed SATA cards support on PowerMacs." in the 3-0
> releases note. Nothing about a mac bios. Am I missing something?

With a PPC Mac ROM on the card it doesn't only just work in a PowerMac (which it didn't before the fix), OpenFirmware can even boot the OS from that card on top of that. The Pegasos II SmartFirmware incorporates an x86 emulator so it can boot from cards with x86 ROM.

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:


Of course it did, you just couldn't boot from it.
Ask Kronos, he's been using one longer then anyone else (w/o Mac firmware).

@Jambalah:

In MorphOS was a bug that was fixed at 3.0 , the bug prevented MorphOS booting if a SATA card was installed in a PowerMac (this was confirmed with SiI3512 cards in MDD Macs)

Although flashing is not needed if you do not want to boot from sata drive, it may still be a trick worth trying. If it fails and your card dies, then the card was most likely somehow faulty.

I'm hoping it will solve my system lock-up problems too.. forgot the card at home this morning, will try again tomorrow.