Firmtek Seritek/1S2 and Seagate 7200.10

Erik, welcome, if you are installing the Firmtek PCI card for the first time you need to boot up from your install CD and use Disk Utility to Initialize (erase) the Seagate hard drive and Format it to Mac OS Extended (journal). So be sure everything is backed up.

Joe

Power Mac G4 Gigabit Ethernet Mac OS X (10.3.9) 1.5 GB Ram, ENCORE/ST G4, Tempo SATA, ATI Radeon 9000, Adaptec 4000

It's the Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) issue I'm not sure about. Some Seagate SATA drives came with this enabled and wouldn't work with most PCI SATA cards, although that could have been limited to their 7200.9 SATA drives.

Another small issue is that the Seagate SATA drives don't come with a legacy molex power connector (if I remember correctly). It's not a big deal as most PCI SATA cards come with a converter cable anyway, but it is additional cable clutter inside your Mac.

I have a (rebadged) FirmTek SeriTek 1S2 in my QuickSilver and the card itself works fine. I don't use the onboard ATA/66 controller at all.

Erik,
Firmtek (Kim specifically) does not recomend the use of Seagate or Maxtor HDs with their SATA cards. The SSC is an issue but according to her there are some other issues as well that keep the two from playing nice. I had the exact same question when I got mine. I ended up with a Hitachi 500GB deskstar per Firmteks suggestion and have been very pleased. Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Chris

P.S. Hitachi just announced the 7K1000 HD. 7200 RPM, 32 Mb cache, perpendicular drive technology, and 1TB of space. I WANT ONE!

1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA HD, Firmtek Seritek 1V4 Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D, BFG 6800 GT oc, 30GB 5.5G video, 4GB 1G nano