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I found a cheaper SATA solution for our beloved Powermacs

I've been experimenting with finding a cheaper solution to add SATA to our beloved Powermacs. I know the cost for SATA controllers can be rather high. You can do this for about $30:

Go to Amazon and buy a Lacie 130823 eSata PCI card. Buy a PCI Sata to eSata converter bracket and a cheap eSata cable. I know this will limit the speeds to about SATA 1 but it works! I now have a 320GB Sata hard drive living happily in my Quicksilver. I thought I would share.

Posted on Oct 1, 2010 8:34 PM

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9 replies

Oct 2, 2010 11:29 AM in response to Allan Jones

Rogue Coder, thanks for the info! I too would like to know if this is bootable.

Allan, on the ATA-100 bus of your MDD, those $3 SATA to PATA drive adapters will give you almost the performance of a Firmtek card**. I use this one in one of my MDD's and it is bootable:

http://www.amazon.com/SATA-PATA-Drive-Interface-Adapter/dp/B002Y2NI4M/ref=pdybh_2?pf_rd_p=280800601&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_i=ybh&pf_rd_m=ATVPDK IKX0DER&pf_rdr=1Z68ZA0PG1HP0JAFMCHZ

I moved the Firmtek card that was in this machine to my Sawtooth where it made a much bigger impact compared to the ATA-66 bus.



**Let me clarify exactly what I have tested since it's possible that better drives could reveal greater differences between the two:

Xbench disk test scores

WD Caviar Blue WD5000KSRTL with Firmtek: 81
WD Caviar Blue WD5000KSRTL with $3 adapter: 78

WD Caviar Green WD15EADS with Firmtek: 89
WD Caviar Green WD15EADS with $3 adapter: 85

Just a note related to Green drives: Stay away from the EARS models with the 4KB sectors, but I find that the EADS models provide decent performance and very good value if you need a lot of storage space in your G4.

Oct 2, 2010 3:12 PM in response to Swampus

After reading through Japamac's benchmarks again, I'm thinking that a high performance drive would, in fact, show a bigger difference between the adapter and the Firmtek card. Japamac gets some numbers with a 10K Raptor and a WD6400AAKS that are simply not possible on the ATA/100 bus. Still, I think this is a viable cost-effective alternative for a single large drive on an MDD ATA/100 motherboard connector.

For those curious, moving the adapter from the ATA/100 to the ATA/66 dropped performance in accordance with what one would expect mathematically. In this case, the performance is not even close to that of the Firmtek card. The adapter itself, of course, is not an upgrade of any kind. It can only operate within the limitations of the bus that it's plugged into and to the extent that the HD's performance features can be felt within the limitations of that bus.

Rogue Coder, have you done any benchmarks on your setup yet?

Oct 2, 2010 3:21 PM in response to Rogue Coder

YMMV, but I have seen the cards going now for $31-$32 on Ebay with free shipping. I managed to get mine on sale from Amazon. I think they are running about $34ish currently. I spent a total of $30 for the setup. Again YMMV, but even with the card being $34ish on Amazon, or $31 on Ebay brand new, you can STILL save money over $70 for a Sonnet or Firmtek card. I'm not downing those companies and their products by any means, but I wanted to at least see if there was a possibility. Now we know! What the neat thing about this card is, it supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 on the Mac. 🙂 SInce it's a pure eSATA card, with only one hard drive I STILL have the option of using an external eSATA hard drive (or DVD Burner if I so choose).

So even if you only have one hard drive, you can STILL boot from the card. My hard drive I boot from is a Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA-2. I will say the ONLY issue I have had, is there is a slight delay from Open Firmware (or the card) when it first initializes. It averages 3 seconds before my Powermac starts to boot OSX. I can't complain, I mean how often do we really boot/reboot our Macs anyway? 🙂

I found a cheaper SATA solution for our beloved Powermacs

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