SCSI/IDE/Firewire hard drive?

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Level 1

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SCSI/IDE/Firewire hard drive?

Hi all,

I've got a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 2002, which has, I think, an ATA/66 bus, Firewire 400 and 64bit PCI slots. How do I find out for sure that the controller can only support up to ATA/66?

I've got a Cheetah U320 SCSI hard drive lying around spare. The boot hard drive I have in the mac right now is an ATA/100 IDE drive connected to the on-board IDE bus. I have a firewire hard drive enclosure.

So, my question is, to speed up the computer in general, should I buy an U320 SCSI controller, which will be expensive, use the SCSI hard drive as boot drive; or put the ATA/100 IDE drive in the firewire enclosure and use that as boot drive; or just leave the current boot drive as it is now?

Thanks very much for your help in advance!

Regards - Piers

PowerMac G4 Quicksilver 2002, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Feb 22, 2009 5:29 AM

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Answer 1

japamac

Level 7

24,400 points

Feb 22, 2009 6:12 AM in response to Piers Kittel

Hi-

The ATA bus is ATA/66 (66MBps), but any ATA 66/100/133 drive is fine.

Seagate says the Cheetah is 125MBps, but MacGuru's suggest a properly paired drive and controller will get 75MBps.
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/scsi/seagatescsidrives.php
If you have the optional Ultra SCSI 160 PCI controller, the SCSI could give you some benefit.

Firewire controller supports 50MBps

or just leave the current boot drive as it is now?

That's better than firewire. Not sure how much a SCSI controller is worth, and how well it will be supported in Leopard.

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Answer 2

Piers Kittel Author

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Feb 22, 2009 7:31 AM in response to japamac

So I guess it's probably not worth spending the extra £100 or so for an extra 9MBps a U320 SCSI controller & U320 10krpm SCSI hard drive will provide?

Thanks very much for your time again, much appreciated!

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Answer 3

Feb 22, 2009 3:43 PM in response to Piers Kittel

You should be able to buy something like an Atto SCSI card off ebay for US$50.
I used to love my fast SCSI gear and still have a 10,000RPM drive inside a couple of older 9600/300s.
Just do a search on ebay for Atto under Apple Computers & Components .
I went the other way and bought a SATA card ( US$25 ) plus a 36Gb WD Velociraptor 10,000 RPM ( Aud $75 ) - both secondhand.
It is a significant improvement on my older ATA 7200RPM drive.
I now have the Raptor as my boot drive and the ATA drive as my backup.

Stewie

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Answer 4

Feb 22, 2009 4:50 PM in response to stewiesno1

The ATTO Express PCI PSC still works fine with the built-in Driver, but does not support LVD -- the fastest transfer method.

The ATTO UL2D is not supported in 10.4 Tiger and later. It appears to install and work fine, but runs in slow motion because it does not get paired with a .kext to give it full speed.

If using the ATTO UL3D or later, be sure to download and install the ATTO "driver" (actually a .kext file) from the ATTO web site. Its default is to install a distinctive Hard Drive icon to let you know it is active.

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Answer 5

Feb 22, 2009 4:56 PM in response to Piers Kittel

Hard drives simply cannot source data off the platters as fast as their stated maximum transfer time.

If Transfer Time were the ONLY issue, we would all be using Fiber Channel over fiber-optic. But the cables cost about US$50 each.

What you want is a transfer time that is fast enough so that it is not the bottleneck. ATA66 is still pretty good for most drives. One-drive-per-ATA-cable gives a substantial speed-up.

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Answer 6

Piers Kittel Author

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Feb 23, 2009 6:34 AM in response to stewiesno1

I'm based in the UK, so Mac based U320 SCSI cards are very rare and very expensive. I'm worried about potential support problems as well, so I think I'll stick with my IDE hard drive.

Thanks for everyone's help though, much appreciated!

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Answer 7

Piers Kittel Author

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Feb 23, 2009 6:39 AM in response to Piers Kittel

Forgot to mention, I already have an Adaptec 29160LP SCSI adaptor, from my old PC. I don't suppose I can get that to work in OS X?

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Answer 8

Piers Kittel Author

Level 1

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Feb 23, 2009 7:04 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Will the UL3D work on 10.5?

Thanks for your time!

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Answer 9

Feb 23, 2009 8:07 AM in response to Piers Kittel

They do not claim that the UL3D will work in 10.5.

I suspect the real issue is, there is no Intel version of the v3.2.1 Driver, so Intel users are not supported.

There are drivers for the UL4D -- version 3.2.0_3.7.0 for 10.3, version 4.3.2 for 10.4 and 10.5.

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Answer 10

Feb 23, 2009 8:05 AM in response to Piers Kittel

In general, Adaptec cards supported in Macs were different from the PC versions, and had "PowerDomain" in their names.

Adaptec has no further interest in the Macintosh market, and dropped most support for Mac SCSI cards in 2002:

"Adaptec is no longer developing SCSI drivers for the Mac OS. Technical support is available for those products still in their complimentary support period; however, there will be no new SCSI drivers, firmware, or patches available."

Adaptec’s Mac OS compliance page

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Answer 11

Piers Kittel Author

Level 1

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Feb 23, 2009 9:12 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Am using it for the PowerPC anyway. I have downloaded and installed the UL3D driver, seems to have installed just fine. I don't have a UL3D card however, so I don't know whether it'd work! I found one from the US for £25, so I might get that and see if it works. If not, I can just put it back on eBay. Is this a good idea? UL4D I think is for PCI-Express. I've only got old-hat PCI.

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Answer 12

Feb 23, 2009 10:08 AM in response to Piers Kittel

The UL4D uses PCI-X with backward compatibility to (plain old) PCI, according to the two-page spec sheet here:

http://www.attotech.com/software/files/techpdfs/TechSheet_ExpressPCIUL4D.pdf

There is also a picture with a connector that looks very familiar.

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Answer 13

Piers Kittel Author

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Feb 23, 2009 10:10 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Excellent.

Would I be able to boot up from a SCSI hard drive using that?

Thanks for your time!

Regards - Piers

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Answer 14

Feb 23, 2009 10:31 AM in response to Piers Kittel

Yes, I believe so.

I am running UL3D in two G4/867 Quicksilvers and a Mirrored Drive Doors dual 1.25 running 10.4.11 for daily use at home. All boot up and run quite happily without any IDE drives at all.

I have a UL4D I expect to install in my Quicksilver G4 OS X Server soon, when I upgrade it to 10.4. I currently run two drives as a RAID mirror array off a UL3D, but boot off an IDE drive. This is mostly because I started it before booting from a RAID array was fully supported.

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Answer 15

Piers Kittel Author

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Feb 23, 2009 7:18 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I was told by Atto that I cannot boot up OS X from the UL3D, so how did you do it?

Will the UL3D work with 10.5, since I installed the UL3D driver successfully on 10.5, but Atto says in the same email that the UL3D won't work with 10.5.

UL4D cards are far too expensive to justify a small speed increase! 🙂

Thanks for everyone's help again!

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