PMac G4, SATA PCI card need to be apple-flashed?
  • Just looking around
    rushpat
    Posts: 6 from 2017/2/2
    I picked up a couple of Apple PowerMAC G4's from around 2000 (a dual 450Ghz and a single cpu 533). Neither has SATA controllers built in, only old IDE/PATA, but I have several SATA drives I'd like to use.

    I see that the sil3112 and sil3114 are supported by MorphOS. I don't have to have OSX bootable, just want to run MorphOS. Do these cards need to have Apple flashed ROMs to boot from a disk, even if it is only MorphOS and not OSX? I know that it will need it for OSX, but just to get to the MorphOS partition, do these cards need to be Apple-specific?

    Thanks!
  • »31.01.20 - 15:51
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  • Moderator
    Kronos
    Posts: 2323 from 2003/2/24
    The OF won‘t be able to see the SATA drives so that is a showstopper.

    My setup:
    Small CF card on the IDE port containing the boot.img

    RDB partinoned SSD on the SATA

    Nothing needed to be flashed.
  • »31.01.20 - 16:26
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  • Paladin of the Pegasos
    Paladin of the Pegasos
    Amigaharry2
    Posts: 1280 from 2010/1/6
    From: EU-Austria (Wien)
    You forgot: OpenFirmware (OF) is responsible for booting any OS on Macs. If OF does'nt recognize that card, how should OF boot any OS from a drive?
    But where is the problem? In your case you have to attatch a small drive to IDE (-> eg. IDE2CF + CF-Card) to boot boot.img from there. If MOS recognizes your SATA-card, the rest can be booting from a bootable partition there. Anyway, the CF-Card MUST be HFS formatted, the rest (for MOS) can be SFS formatted.

    Ups: Kronos answered first....


    [ Editiert durch Amigaharry2 31.01.2020 - 17:39 ]
    Peg2, 3xPowerMac G5, 2xPowerbookG4, 2x MacMiniG4, Efika (again), A3000T and life is never boring.....
  • »31.01.20 - 16:37
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  • Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Cool_amigaN
    Posts: 761 from 2011/11/30
    @rushpat

    Buy a Digitus Ds-33151-1 IDE-SATA converter for 10 euros and you are good to go. It does udma so you can work with any sata ssd. When I upgraded from the old mechanical hd on a Sawtooth PMAC G4 I got half boot times and 10-12MB/s instead of 6-8MB/s. Listing my games dir (64GB) took approx. 10 secs and now it takes just 2ms. Plus it offloaded more than 50% of CPU.

    I think that those sata cards have a bottlneck on the pci bus. I would like to benchmark them compared to my installed solution. If anyone is interested run the Diskspeed benchmark and post it here.
    Amiga gaming Tribute: Watch, rate, comment :)
  • »01.02.20 - 09:34
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  • Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    ernsteiswuerfel
    Posts: 556 from 2015/6/18
    From: Funeralopolis
    Quote:

    Cool_amigaN schrieb:
    I think that those sata cards have a bottlneck on the pci bus. I would like to benchmark them compared to my installed solution. If anyone is interested run the Diskspeed benchmark and post it here.

    I would, but unfortunately the SiL3012 is giving me headaches in my PMac G4 DP (see this thread). After some email conversation with the Devteam the SiL-SATA controller is the main suspect in giving me this freezing issues.
    Talos II. [Gentoo Linux] | PMac G5 11,2. PMac G4 3,6. PBook G4 5,8. [MorphOS 3.18 / Gentoo Linux] | A600GS
  • »01.02.20 - 12:04
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